Microsoft recently held their annual Ignite Conference as a primarily online event, with an in-person presence in select cities around the world. EDB attended and provided visitors to our virtual booth visitors the opportunity to respond to a short set of survey questions about their use of the cloud and the business benefits they expect from a fully managed DBaaS such as EDB BigAnimal.
What did we find? Here are the top three conclusions from our short survey of Microsoft Ignite visitors.
Public and multi-cloud rules
The first question was about attendees’ use of the cloud. We asked if they were using Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, a private cloud, or were still on premises. Respondents could select all that apply at their organization.
As this was a Microsoft Azure-focused event, unsurprisingly 83% of visitors said they were using Microsoft Azure. 53% of respondents said they use Amazon AWS and 21% mentioned GCP. Interestingly, 52% of all cloud users take a multi-cloud platform approach, with only 30% using a single cloud platform.
In the battle between public and private clouds, our survey showed that the winner has been declared—fully 94% claim to be using a public cloud vs. only 9% who use a private cloud. And those private cloud users were essentially all using a public cloud in addition to their use of the private cloud.
Running on premises registered only 5% of responses, but on premises is still used by 29% of those also using the cloud.
These results suggest that most organizations are spreading applications and workloads across different architectures based on their application needs, as opposed to simply selecting a single cloud approach. As in most endeavors, one size does not fit all.
Fully managed DBaaS promises big business benefits
We also asked Ignite attendees to select from a list of business benefits they would expect from a fully managed database-as-a-service such as BigAnimal. This question allowed attendees to select one or more benefits from a list of 7 options including “other” in case we missed an important one. In this area, nearly 3 in 4 (73%) see multiple business benefits by moving to a fully managed cloud database, versus only 27% who selected a single benefit from our list.
In order of most popular expected benefits, attendees picked these the most often:
- “Free up resources normally spent on supporting databases” and “Built in security and compliance” were tied for first, each selected by 56% of respondents, followed by “Automated updates, patches, and bug fixes” at 53%. Organizations are looking for their managed cloud database providers to take over the day-to-day management and maintenance tasks from their internal IT teams, and also deliver an architecture that will help them meet the security and compliance requirements of their applications and business.
- Automation appeared again as a compelling benefit. “Automated backup and recovery” was selected by 39% of respondents, followed closely by “Specialized support - don’t need to hire experts” which was selected by 34%. While these benefits are closely related to those in the most popular category, it’s worth pointing out the additional cost savings that comes from not having to hire people specifically to support the database. That’s a clear benefit from a fully managed service where the experts on staff to support the database are employed by the provider.
- 28% chose “Simplified database deployment with high availability out-of-the-box” as a benefit. While this might seem an obvious advantage from a fully managed service, some database providers (EDB included) offer a measure of control for customers over how databases are provisioned and deployed. Simplicity in this process was perceived as a good thing by nearly a third of respondents.
Migrating from legacy relational databases
One-third of respondents said they are looking to reduce their Oracle database spend by switching to a different database, such as Postgres. With the enormous investments made by organizations over several decades in relational databases such as Oracle, and the rapidly increasing investment in cloud databases, this is likely to become an increasingly growing percentage. But why is this an issue and why are organizations looking to switch? A recent article in InfoWorld sheds some light as to the possible reason—PostgreSQL is “the easy button.”
We’ll continue to monitor the sentiment from the market with surveys at future events, so check back to see what we discover.