By Chris Chelliah
We have entered a truly data-driven world. According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 6.0 report, there are 473,400 tweets made, 49,380 photos posted on Instagram, and almost 13 million text messages sent every minute of every day. Data like this holds immense value for those able to collect, organise, and leverage it.
For businesses today, data is the new battleground, and being able to master it through sound management has a direct impact on an organisation’s success. This makes the lowly database, whether on-premise or in the cloud, the beating heart of the enterprise. If left unoptimised and running slowly, employee productivity and customer experience will suffer, and the data within cannot be leveraged for innovation. Furthermore, if the database is not secure, the company faces a greater risk from security breaches.
Data management is clearly integral to the successful running of an organisation, but the task only gets harder as databases grow in size and complexity. Enterprises must look to new solutions driven by automation and machine learning to unlock their data potential.
To err is human
Traditionally, the task of data management has fallen to the database administrator (DBA). Their role is to create, modify, and tune enterprise databases for maximum performance and security. It’s a role that is far more complex than it perhaps initially appears, and it should not be underestimated in terms of importance.
When an employee or client wants to retrieve data, the process is complex and can consume a great deal of time, as well as compute and disk-access resources. This is especially true at peak times when thousands or potentially millions of hosts are trying to access the database.
This manual approach is beginning to crumble under the weight of organisational data. Traditional database management has become extremely time-consuming and expensive: 72% of IT budgets are spent simply maintaining existing information systems. Time and resources could be better spent elsewhere, such as on IT innovation.
With DBAs often finding themselves managing 50 or more databases a day, human error can often result – such as failing to apply a security update or being unable to keep a database fully optimised.
These errors can be disastrous for uptime and security, but there’s a more fundamental problem. A company unable to keep its databases performant is less able to utilise its data effectively. Employees will struggle to get the data they need and will be slower to make decisions, while customers will suffer from an unsatisfying user experience. Every second of every day, the company is running slower than the competition and, gradually but surely, falling behind the pace of the market.
The benefits of the autonomous approach
To remain relevant and competitive in the long run, companies must explore new ways to reduce the effort needed to maintain databases, limit downtime, and above all, accelerate performance and as a result innovation.
While putting databases in the cloud has already gone some way towards taking human effort and responsibility out of active database management, a revolution is taking place behind the scenes.
Increasingly, with the advent of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, autonomous systems are being born.
The resulting “autonomous database” is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing, making it both easy and cost effective to adopt, while freeing IT up to focus on innovation and value-adding tasks.
A data shot to the arm
Above all else, an autonomous database gives organisations a data shot to the arm – the ability to better access and utilise their data faster and more efficiently, enabling greater productivity and a more seamless, competitive customer experience.
Liang Zhicong, Senior IT Manager at AsiaPay, headquartered in Hong Kong, said: “The fierce competition in the payment market means that we need to continually explore new ways to support the increasingly diverse payment methods, channels, and experiences. To do this, we need to deeply analyse the data and truly understand the current changes. This is crucial. Only in this way can we continue to provide safe and reliable payment solutions that help retailers keep up with the times and help us develop our own global markets. Oracle Autonomos Database has been key to helping us do this. The platform has freed our IT team free itself from the cumbersome data management tasks (such as database patching, tuning, indexing, etc.); and given us new insight on how we can provide customers with additional data and new consulting services and insights so that they can also better understand their markets and make better business decisions. It’s been a win-win all around.”
The direction of travel is clear – databases are only going to get larger, more complex, and more important to business success. The companies that will be successful are those that fully utilise the benefits of the cloud and other emerging technologies arriving on the scene, while marring their human talent with the self-learning capabilities of the machines. The resulting data injection will enable these companies to become truly data-driven, able to boost areas critical for success, and drive the customer and employee experience to new heights.
(The writer is the Oracle Asia Pacific Group Vice President and Chief Architect – Core Technology and Cloud. He has more than 24 years of experience in the information systems industry; 20 of those years have been with Oracle across different portfolios in Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America.)
We have entered a truly data-driven world. According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 6.0 report, there are 473,400 tweets made, 49,380 photos posted on Instagram, and almost 13 million text messages sent every minute of every day. Data like this holds immense value for those able to collect, organise, and leverage it.
For businesses today, data is the new battleground, and being able to master it through sound management has a direct impact on an organisation’s success. This makes the lowly database, whether on-premise or in the cloud, the beating heart of the enterprise. If left unoptimised and running slowly, employee productivity and customer experience will suffer, and the data within cannot be leveraged for innovation. Furthermore, if the database is not secure, the company faces a greater risk from security breaches.
Data management is clearly integral to the successful running of an organisation, but the task only gets harder as databases grow in size and complexity. Enterprises must look to new solutions driven by automation and machine learning to unlock their data potential.
To err is human
Traditionally, the task of data management has fallen to the database administrator (DBA). Their role is to create, modify, and tune enterprise databases for maximum performance and security. It’s a role that is far more complex than it perhaps initially appears, and it should not be underestimated in terms of importance.
When an employee or client wants to retrieve data, the process is complex and can consume a great deal of time, as well as compute and disk-access resources. This is especially true at peak times when thousands or potentially millions of hosts are trying to access the database.
This manual approach is beginning to crumble under the weight of organisational data. Traditional database management has become extremely time-consuming and expensive: 72% of IT budgets are spent simply maintaining existing information systems. Time and resources could be better spent elsewhere, such as on IT innovation.
With DBAs often finding themselves managing 50 or more databases a day, human error can often result – such as failing to apply a security update or being unable to keep a database fully optimised.
These errors can be disastrous for uptime and security, but there’s a more fundamental problem. A company unable to keep its databases performant is less able to utilise its data effectively. Employees will struggle to get the data they need and will be slower to make decisions, while customers will suffer from an unsatisfying user experience. Every second of every day, the company is running slower than the competition and, gradually but surely, falling behind the pace of the market.
The benefits of the autonomous approach
To remain relevant and competitive in the long run, companies must explore new ways to reduce the effort needed to maintain databases, limit downtime, and above all, accelerate performance and as a result innovation.
While putting databases in the cloud has already gone some way towards taking human effort and responsibility out of active database management, a revolution is taking place behind the scenes.
Increasingly, with the advent of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, autonomous systems are being born.
The resulting “autonomous database” is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing, making it both easy and cost effective to adopt, while freeing IT up to focus on innovation and value-adding tasks.
A data shot to the arm
Above all else, an autonomous database gives organisations a data shot to the arm – the ability to better access and utilise their data faster and more efficiently, enabling greater productivity and a more seamless, competitive customer experience.
Liang Zhicong, Senior IT Manager at AsiaPay, headquartered in Hong Kong, said: “The fierce competition in the payment market means that we need to continually explore new ways to support the increasingly diverse payment methods, channels, and experiences. To do this, we need to deeply analyse the data and truly understand the current changes. This is crucial. Only in this way can we continue to provide safe and reliable payment solutions that help retailers keep up with the times and help us develop our own global markets. Oracle Autonomos Database has been key to helping us do this. The platform has freed our IT team free itself from the cumbersome data management tasks (such as database patching, tuning, indexing, etc.); and given us new insight on how we can provide customers with additional data and new consulting services and insights so that they can also better understand their markets and make better business decisions. It’s been a win-win all around.”
The direction of travel is clear – databases are only going to get larger, more complex, and more important to business success. The companies that will be successful are those that fully utilise the benefits of the cloud and other emerging technologies arriving on the scene, while marring their human talent with the self-learning capabilities of the machines. The resulting data injection will enable these companies to become truly data-driven, able to boost areas critical for success, and drive the customer and employee experience to new heights.
(The writer is the Oracle Asia Pacific Group Vice President and Chief Architect – Core Technology and Cloud. He has more than 24 years of experience in the information systems industry; 20 of those years have been with Oracle across different portfolios in Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America.)