Record numbers of businesses are investing in “as-a-Service” (XaaS) infrastructures and moving parts (or all) of their IT infrastructure to public clouds. Many of these same businesses are moving their databases to the cloud as part of this trend. Why? The promise of the cloud is easy setup, simplified management, guaranteed availability, and on-demand scalability—all at a known price with no surprises.
In the minds of companies moving their database to the cloud, this translates to a one-and-done decision that comes with a low overhead: database instances, on-demand, with little to no oversight or hassle. You probably can even reduce the number of DBAs on staff! But is it true?
In reality, cloud providers provide an excellent resource for creating and maintaining cloud database infrastructure, but do not provide the necessary technical expertise that gets the best business value out of your database. It is a company’s responsibility to develop, implement, and optimize the architecture that most serves its business goals.