The future of the database is as a service

Databases have been the working horse for many corporate (and none corporate) applications. Traditionally you can see that databases are part of the most guarded parts of your enterprise IT landscape and traditionally do require some of the most expensive resources to maintain. If you check the average salary charts of the past years you can see that DBA resources have been topping the lists. Also databases do often require expensive hardware and networking components to keep up with the growing demand for data within your company which adds to the total cost of ownership for a database in your company.

Departments do require a constant access to corporate databases to interact with via applications or to query to get insight into certain details of your business operations. This makes databases in many cases one of the most important parts of your enterprise IT landscape and the monetary effect of downtime is in most cases huge.

So we have a couple of things, databases are (often) expensive to host, expensive in license, do require specialized high-end hardware, do require specific expertise to maintain and to operate and besides all that they are becoming more and more critical to your day to day business operations.

Taking this into consideration the results from the IOUG ResearchWire are not that surprising. Those figures do state that a large number of companies are thinking about new ways of thinking about databases (and other parts of the Enterprise IT landscape). Where a couple of years ago you could not start a discussion of moving a database off premise we have seen that companies have been moving their databases to dedicated hardware platforms at outsourcing partners. The next step you see those companies are making is putting it now in cloud hosting solutions where they can make use of the economy of scale and the expertise of a large international group of expertise at their cloud hosting partner.

Databases (database platform as a service), Application server (platform as a service) and identity as a service are all considered to be in the PaaS domain. The PaaS domain or Platform as a Service a quickly growing market where you do see DBaaS (database as a Service) and APaaS (Application server as a Service) solution kicking in. One of the examples is the Capgemini cloud hosting solution for Oracle products named Capgemini Oracle Run that is developed recently where you can see that DBaaS and APaaS solutions are offered to customers. Oracle is also running a great article on its blogs section of the oracle.com website which is written by Anand Akela and is a great read.