Databases are business critical elements in any technology landscape. The database is not a standalone entity. It requires an allied ecosystem which enables manual provisioning, security of the database, continuous round-the-clock monitoring, patch management etc. It also mandates that proper back up mechanisms are in place and recovery and troubleshooting is taken care of. It must be continuously tested, tuned to enhance its efficiency, regularly upgraded, and must be highly available with a clear disaster recovery framework.
The cost, time and effort associated with the above is intensive. Is Autonomous Database the answer?
Let us begin with understanding what is an autonomous database. We recommend that you read our blog on introduction to autonomous databases to know this concept in-depth.
Autonomous databases simplify the above-mentioned tasks associated with a database. The result is that autonomous databases can save an immense amount of time, and effort spent on database management while also ensuring that the costs associated with the management of database is reduced by almost 80%.
Let us understand how the autonomous database scores over traditional database in terms of cost reduction.
With traditional databases, the IT teams must provision for the maximum workload anticipated. It must further ensure that a significant additional provisioning must be done as a safety measure. However, the case of maximum workloads is not an everyday occurrence. On the contrary, it might occur very rarely or not occur at all. Hence, traditional database capacity is almost always underutilized.
With the new-age Cloud based databases and universal credits subscription model that database powerhouses such as Oracle has facilitated, customers must pay for exactly the resources they consume. With Autonomous Databases, the flexibility to upscale or down provision compute and storage resources is a great enabler. It enables “just-in-time” provisioning of resources and decreases run-time costs by up to 90%.
How does this impact application development and “go-to-market” strategies?
Most of you may have been in situations wherein the application is ready and awaits databases for testing before going into production. The delay can be a few weeks to even months.
This, often, hampers launch of new features which can enhance customer experience and accelerate business. Hence, the impact of such delays can be directly felt on the sales, business, and customer satisfaction. With Autonomous Databases, the provisioning can happen in a few minutes and enables organizations to innovate, test and “go-to-market” faster. This can lead to more business and can also save immense amount of time, effort, and money that the organization spends to enable a seamless process of provisioning for all applications.
In addition, the Autonomous Database subscription comes bundled with many management, testing, and security capabilities that previously had to be licensed by the organization. These include packages for data encryption, tuning, diagnostics, real application testing, data masking, redaction and sub- setting, hybrid columnar compression, database vault, in-memory capabilities, and advanced analytics.
Autonomous Databases can help you to truly leverage the power of cloud, reassign critical human resource bandwidth towards innovative initiatives, and save huge amount of time, cost and efforts that is spent in provisioning and database management. It is worthwhile to try it out, especially for mission-critical databases that significantly contribute to the bottom line of the business.
