NEW – AWS Database Migration Week Shares the Value of Database-as-a-Service

It’s no secret that public sector organizations around the world are adopting cloud for websites, storage, backup, test/dev workloads and analytics. But what about mission critical workloads and the elements at the heart of those workloads—data, databases and data management?

According to Independent Research Firm Forrester, around 28% of global infrastructure decision makers across sectors already say they support Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) deployments, but they predict this number will double in the next four years. Behind this are a host of challenges that IT organizations face with traditional on-premises database deployments. For instance:

1. Licensing costs and terms – Data growth is exploding, causing an increase in demand for database and analytic tools, but these tools can carry a high cost. Software licensing costs can be up to 80% of an infrastructure stack, and licensing terms can drive vendor lock-in, limiting innovation.
2. Mounting administrative tasks – Repetitive, manual operations needed to deploy and maintain a database platform on-premises can take up to seven skillsets (usually requiring the attention of several different staff members). Some of these tasks include configuring and tuning systems, network, and storage, database provisioning, patching, backup, HA implementation, and database optimization. This can drive public sector organizations to spend up to 73% of their time on maintenance versus innovation.
3. Keeping pace with data and user growth – Exploding data and a greater focus on data-driven decisions by leaders is puts stress on existing database infrastructure. In addition, today’s line-of-business owners are becoming more data driven and demanding more from database and analytic tools. Database analysts (DBAs) often struggle to meet SLA’s of business leads, as IT leads are caught in a cycle of buying and deploying hardware. This churn becomes taxing and cannot keep pace with demands. This infrastructure is also the foundation for the performance of critical business applications.

So, how can technologists avoid these challenges? Many government, education and nonprofit leaders are looking to the cloud for help, and AWS has provided tools and services to make the migration of database workloads to the cloud easier. By migrating to an AWS database cloud service, you can expect to:

• Pay for what you use, with no licensing terms.
• Support end-user demands with elastic and scalable compute and storage resources.
• Keep pace with application requirements or support group leaders with access to real-time data insights.
• Experience greater performance at a lower cost by avoiding hardware or licensing costs and executing database operations faster, cutting consumption costs.
• Decrease the time spent on database management tasks and hardware provisioning.
• Reduce application outage to almost zero through database replication during your migration process.
• Take advantage of support for heterogeneous migrations between database engines or into other database types such as relational to NoSQL or relational to Redshift.

These benefits allow DBAs to minimize maintenance operations and focus on critical tasks, like architecture, planning, data security, and data life-cycle management. They can elevate their roles by focusing on important work like application tuning and data modeling.

To help you along your path to the cloud, we have migration frameworks available, such as the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), Migration Hub, and the Well-Architected Framework (WAF).

We also provide database migration tools and services, including the AWS Database Migration Service, the AWS Schema Conversion Tool, and have professional services teams dedicated to public sector segments. This global team of experts works alongside customers, sharing their experience through tech talk webinars, whitepapers, and blog posts that are available to anyone.

By taking advantage of AWS database cloud solutions, migration tools and professional services, public sector organizations can make better use of one of their best assets—their data—to better accomplish their missions.

Explore AWS database cloud services and customer use cases, and most importantly, register for the AWS Database Migration Week.