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Ireland and Israel at Oracle
Autonomous Today, Not Tomorrow
As database administrators will tell you, their task is a complex one – and it’s certainly one that comes with increasing levels of responsibility. If something goes wrong, it does not result in just a couple of hours of business downtime. In fact, if the function or security of the database is compromised, that is going to substantially affect profitability and corporate reputation. Unplanned downtime costs of approximately US$260,000 per hour across all types of business and the average cost of a data breach tops US$3.5 million.
With even more explosive data growth ahead, database management is poised to become more crucial, more costly, and more complex. How can businesses cope? The key will be database automation, enabling enterprise information to be managed more effectively, with less effort. One technology, in particular, is unlocking new levels of time and cost-savings: autonomous.
The autonomous platform is an evolution of traditional cloud computing. In each iteration, cloud computing has helped database administrators manage information with more ease and speed. During the early days of Infrastructure-asa-Service, companies saw financial gains of 15 to 25 percent.
Next came the automated cloud platform, with the platform as a service offering a new level of productivity and automation. For the first time, database administrators could automate some tuning and patching capabilities. In addition, because the technology could seamlessly integrate with other cloud services like big data and the internet of things, there were more opportunities to innovate.
The autonomous database offers three key advantages, each of which translates into a significant financial impact
This resulted in an equivalent financial increase of 25 to 30 percent for companies – but it wasn’t perfect.
Today, businesses finally have access to a fully autonomous cloud platform. It automates the management of the database to deliver unprecedented availability, performance, and security – with no human labor, and therefore, no human error. Fully autonomous and mission-critical proven, the autonomous database is reducing downtime to under two and a half minutes per month and bumping up the financial gains by as much as 35 percent.
The autonomous database offers three key advantages, each of which translates into a significant financial impact.
Firstly, the autonomous database is self-driving, which means lower costs and increased productivity from IT staff, who are now freed to focus on higher value tasks. With built-in machine learning algorithms, the database can manage itself. There are also infrastructure cost benefits from standardization and elasticity, so the business can scale at will and improve time to market, bringing out new products and services more quickly. The typical impact on a data warehouse – An impressive 30 to 35 percent average cost reduction.
The second major advantage of autonomous is that it is self-securing. This has a huge impact in terms of avoiding data breaches and protecting brand reputation, as well as helping businesses meet new and evolving compliance standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). When potential compliance fines can equate four percent of revenue, this means serious cost savings.
The third key advantage of autonomous is that it is self-repairing. The vast majority of app developers (90 percent) say updating databases delays their application releases, while 72 percent of CIOs say they struggle to balance business innovation with operational excellence. But with autonomous, the database constantly regulates its own operation, protecting data and ensuring processes are running smoothly. This reduces planned and unplanned downtime, which can cost businesses up to 0.2 percent of revenue.
Autonomous means businesses are no longer stuck with a rigid architecture unable to cope with rapid change. Before, companies required an army of experts to custom-build and manually maintain a complex hardware and software stack. But this model was a poor economy of scale, relying on high labour, capital and runtime costs, plus low agility, security, availability, and performance. With autonomous databases, businesses can reduce their manual provisioning and maintenance while uncovering more ways to use data and drive new revenue opportunities.
Humans are now generating an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day, and more data has been created in the past two years than in all of human history. As these figures continue to climb, there will be even more pressure on businesses to make the most of the data available. Database management will be more crucial than ever before, and emerging technologies like autonomous will soon become the norm as they help businesses boost innovation and financial gains–without boosting costs.
