Cloud solutions and services continue to grow in acceptance for many reasons - the ease of deployment and upgrades, elastic scalability, and the pay as you go simplicity. Cloud database options offer an approach that allows organizations to run a database on a cloud platform, either running the DB on the cloud independently or selecting a database service that is maintained by a public cloud service provider.
Cloud-based, or cloud-friendly, databases provide advantages in terms of faster deployment, flexibility, reduced upfront capital commitment, and easy maintenance.
With the promise of on-demand scalability to deal with unexpected workload spikes, database cloud capabilities, which are also dubbed database as a service or data as a service, offer traditional relational as well as NoSQL data management capabilities, allowing organizations to easily choose the right software to meet their needs.
Whether accessed in the cloud on a subscription basis, within the security of enterprise walls as a private cloud, or as a hybrid database instance, cloud computing, especially cloud databases, offer a way for organizations to more effectively deal with demands for more access and capabilities while also keeping control of cost. In this way, cloud databases can help organizations to address infrastructure inadequacies as well as help them bridge the skills gap as they make forays into the world of Hadoop and NoSQL data management.
Built on shared resources, cloud approaches facilitate the sharing of cost across business divisions as in the case of private clouds or across companies as is the case with public clouds.
While cloud approaches have clear advantages, many believe that due to the issues of security and governance, hybrid approaches to data management that combine on-premise and cloud solutions will be embraced for the foreseeable future. Particularly for organizations in heavily regulated industries, this allows a greater degree of control over their data. Still, with the greater need to do more with data, to support a greater range of data types, and take advantage of new database technologies the issues of Opex versus Capex and the ability to avoid the investment in new database skills, some believe, make cloud databases an appealing choice.
HERE ARE THE WINNERS OF THE 2016 DBTA READERS' CHOICE AWARDS FOR BEST CLOUD DATABASE:
Winner:
Amazon RDS
Winners' Circle by Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services, Amazon Web ServicesOur goal at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to enable our customers to do things that were previously not possible, and make things that our customers can already do simpler and better at a much lower cost. Adhering to this goal has made Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) what it is today ... read on.
Finalists:
Microsoft SQL Azure
Oracle Database 12c