Cloud databases, also referred to as database as a service (DBaaS), can be SQL or NoSQL, open source or relational, and allow customers to choose the environment that is best suited for their particular use cases—whatever that may be, including support for streaming data pipelines or a data warehousing for analytics.
Cloud is increasingly being used by organizations to support a range of users, including data managers, developers, and testers, who require almost instantaneous access to a database environment without going through their respective IT, finance, or top managers or needing to acquire new servers or storage arrays to support their efforts.
Flexible scaling and the ability to offload time-consuming database administration tasks to the cloud vendor are additional advantages.
According to a recent IOUG survey conducted among members by Unisphere Research, a division of Information, Today, Inc., in cooperation with Oracle, database as a service (DBaaS) is taking off, with adoption tripling over the next 24 months.
The survey report, “Database as a Service Enters The Enterprise Mainstream: 2016 IOUG Survey On Database Cloud,” also disclosed that enterprise customers see a future with hybrid approaches, relying on a combination of private and public cloud resources. As the number of cloud services within enterprises grows, there will be more reliance on both for cost mitigation, as well as backup and continuity. Cloud is increasingly seen as a highly agile and robust platform for enterprise application development. More development work is going to the cloud, a database backup and disaster recovery, along with enterprise applications are the areas seeing the greatest returns from cloud implementations.
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, provides an approach for organizations to more effectively deal with demands for more access and capabilities while also keeping control of cost.
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