Reports of the death of the relational database have been greatly exaggerated – at least in the enterprise.

According to a new study from Progress Software – the company’s latest annual data connectivity report – while the on-premises relational database behemoths of SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle have declined year on year, the cloud push is not yet forthcoming for mission-critical workloads.

55% of the more than 1,400 business and IT professionals surveyed said they or their customers were currently using SQL, compared with 40% for MySQL and 37% for Oracle. “For important data, there is no substitute for relational databases,” the report noted.

“Modern options such as big data, NoSQL still aren’t the right fit for all business needs, with analytical tooling for these modern databases still in its infancy,” the report added. “Thus RDBMS databases are keeping pace and are here to stay in the enterprise for the foreseeable future.”

Indeed, enterprise decision makers see cloud and NoSQL databases as there to solve alternative problems for businesses, such as enabling greater fluidity across different platforms and accelerated edge to cloud workloads.

In comparison, one in three (32%) organisations polled said they did not use any big data platforms or interfaces. Perhaps surprisingly, Amazon S3 only polled 19% of the vote, with a further 5% saying they plan to use it in the coming two years. As for the other big data vendors, Hadoop Hive (17%) was the most popular, ahead of Spark SQL (10%) and Hortonworks (7%).

When it came to NoSQL, MongoDB (27% currently supported, 7% plan to adopt) was by far the most popular technology among respondents. Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the changing atmosphere surrounding several of the leading open source providers. Towards the end of last year Confluent – which recently secured a $2.5 billion valuation – changed its licensing terms with one eye on the largest cloud vendors running software as a service through their technology. MongoDB has done the same thing, as has Redis Labs, used by 7% of those polled by Progress.

Speaking of which, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the most popular cloud provider according to survey respondents, cited by 44% of those polled. Microsoft Azure (39%) was not far behind, until a significant gap to VMware (22%) and Google Cloud (18%). Only 8% of respondents were IBM houses. AWS had seen a 12% uptick year on year, with Azure (+7%) and GCP (+3%) the others to see growth.

Underpinning all the data these organisations pick up, whether they use relational or non-relational databases to structure it, is business intelligence. Organisations use on average 2.5 different BI reporting tools, with Tableau usage increasing the most. Excel (42%) was perhaps not surprisingly the most popular tool, ahead of Microsoft BI Platform (26%), Tableau (22%) and Power BI (18%), showcasing a Microsoft-heavy top list. The report noted how the need for data visualisation has grown significantly, as well as embedded analytics.

“As enterprises grow, a wide variety of data is produced, consumed and stored at different parts of the organisation. The challenge is to effectively manage and leverage the volume, variety and velocity of data,” the report concluded. “At a time when budgets and resources remain tight, the old approach of trying constantly to increase expenditures on infrastructure and hardware assets can’t keep pace.

“The success of a business lies in its seamless data connectivity and integration technology in an increasingly hybrid cloud/on-premises world.”

You can read the full report here (email required).

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Using serverless computing has a number of obvious benefits over traditional application infrastructure – you pay only for what you use, scale up or down immediately to match supply with demand, and avoid operating any server infrastructure at all.

However, implementing maintainable and scalable applications using serverless computing services like AWS Lambda poses a number of challenges. The absence of long-lived, user-managed servers means that states cannot be maintained by the service. Longer function invocation times (referred to as cold starts) become very important to track, because they impact the response time of the service and will impose additional cost. Additionally, the transition to smaller individual components (much like breaking a monolithic application into microservices) results in a simpler deployment model, but makes the system as a whole increasingly complex.

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While a hybrid cloud can ease that transition, designing and deploy that hybrid cloud still offers challenges for organizations concerned about lack of available cloud skillsets within their organization. Managed service providers offer a unique opportunity to fill those gaps and get organizations of all sizes on a hybrid cloud that meets their comfort level, while delivering enhanced benefits for cost, efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity.

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In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.

It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.

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Public clouds dominate IT conversations but the next phase of cloud evolutions are “multi” hybrid cloud environments. The winners in the cloud services industry will be those organizations that understand how to leverage these technologies as complete service solutions for specific customer verticals. In turn, both business and IT actors throughout the enterprise will need to increase their engagement with multi-cloud deployments today while planning a technology strategy that will constitute a significant part of their IT budgets in the very near future. As IoT solutions are growing rapidly, as well as security challenges growing exponentially, without a doubt, the cloud world is about to change for the better. Again.

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A recent IDG survey reported that 89% of businesses have, or plan to, invest in digital initiatives this year. But despite the buzz around digital transformation, implementing it isn’t always smooth sailing – only 44% fully adopted the approach. Introducing new company-wide initiatives can be a daunting prospect for leaders, employees and CIOs alike, but particularly for the latter when it comes to assessing the best cloud environment for a business.

Successful digital transformation isn’t possible without core infrastructure which is fast, and offers maximum reliability and flexibility. In today’s environment, public cloud is no longer the go-to solution, and businesses should consider a multi-cloud strategy to cater for their individual needs.

Before exploring its benefits and challenges businesses ought to consider, I’ll look at what multi-cloud is and how it differs to hybrid cloud.

Public, private, hybrid and multi – a lesson in cloud

We are living in the era of cloud adoption. A report released by Eurostat in December 2018 revealed that 26% of European enterprises are using the cloud. While this may seem low, the point is that there is still enormous room for growth as more businesses make the transition to cloud-based infrastructure.

While multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are closely related, they are not one and the same. Hybrid cloud, as the name implies, is a combination of public and private cloud services. For certain businesses, the model enables organisations to tap into the benefits of the public cloud, while maintaining their own private cloud for sensitive, critical or highly regulated data and applications.

In recent years, the popularity of public and hybrid cloud has signalled that more businesses are seeking off-premise services. That said, even hybrid cloud only offers a service, meaning a singular entity. Multi-cloud on the other hand, is a series of entities that can be brought under centralised management. A multi-cloud strategy is an approach that operates any combination of private, public and hybrid clouds. Therefore, an organisation may have multiple public and private clouds, or multiple hybrid clouds, all either connected or not.

Despite the types of cloud environments you choose to operate in, its these technological breakthroughs in cloud infrastructure that has allowed companies to ideate and conceive new solutions and services at a faster pace.

Take the Internet of Things phenomenon as an example. The proliferation of wearable devices, smart household appliances and security sensors has only been made possible through developments in multi-cloud infrastructure. But putting global internet trends aside, what are the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy? And what challenges are there to consider when implementing it?

With multi-cloud, the world is your oyster

It’s worth for a moment pausing to take into account the benefits of hybrid cloud first. Hybrid cloud lets organisations take advantage of the scalability that the public cloud offers. It also lets businesses share resources and migrate between public and private clouds to take advantage of resource costs and network traffic levels which are often in flux.

That all said, with multi-cloud, the world becomes your oyster. A multi-cloud approach provides the most comprehensive mix of public and private clouds, and they don’t necessarily need to be integrated, unlike hybrid cloud. Moreover, businesses today don’t have to be locked in to one provider. Certain platforms are built on open-source technologies like OpenStack, which are widely supported by a range of cloud service providers and vendors such as OVH. At the very least, opting for an open cloud gives businesses an extra element of flexibility.

From speaking to our customers at OVH, combining on-premise and cloud infrastructure with a multi-cloud strategy has allowed them to connect to networks in a totally isolated and secure way, via numerous points of presence around the world.

What’s more, I’ve noticed how it has allowed organisations to shift to the cloud at their own pace and take a flexible approach – all while responding to their strategic objectives. This means businesses can control and run an application, workload, or data on any cloud (public, private and hybrid) based on their individual technical requirements.

Careful consideration

While there are many benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, naturally with new process come new challenges. Multiple cloud platforms can open up a wider range of possible vulnerabilities. Thus, they require extra effort to gain effective security, governance and compliance. Today however, businesses can take back an element of control and issues can be offset with thorough training for employees on security requirements. For example, organisations can roll out mandatory IT staff training about how to avoid failures in protection and what the reaction to a security breach or data loss should be.

Therefore, successful multi-cloud security requires embracing cloud-based offerings capable of providing continuous verification, analytics, and governance throughout your software delivery and operations processes.

Another point to consider when opting for cloud diversity is maintaining control of your budget. In order to ensure maximum efficiency with a multi-cloud strategy, it can be useful to have an internal team that can consolidate data and provide a cost benefit analysis for the organisation. It’s also important to monitor cloud spends and finetune them depending on current and upcoming projects.

Whichever way you cut it, cloud adoption is not a matter of it, but when. Importantly, if a business is undergoing change, there are a myriad of cloud environments to help organisations manage that change. As technology continues to advance, cloud infrastructure will become a mandatory requirement for organisations of all sizes to develop and grow. To cater to every organisations’ changing needs, we’re increasingly advocating a multi-cloud approach that will allow businesses to achieve their digital transformation needs.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Emil Sayegh is an early pioneer of cloud computing and is recognized as one of the industry’s true veterans. A cloud visionary, he is credited with launching and leading the cloud computing and hosting businesses for HP, Rackspace, and Codero. Emil built the Rackspace cloud business while serving as the company’s GM of the Cloud Computing Division.

Earlier at Rackspace he served as VP of the Product Group and launched the company’s private cloud and hosted exchange services. He later moved on to HP where he served as VP of Cloud Service and initiated the company’s public cloud services. In 2012, Emil joined Codero Hosting as Chairman, President, and CEO and led the next generation of cloud computing with the hybrid cloud. In 2015 he led the successful sale of Codero to a consortium of telecom companies.

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Signs of a shift in the usage of public clouds are everywhere

Previously, as organizations outgrew old IT methods, the natural answer was to try the public cloud approach; however, the public platform alone is not a complete solutionThe move to hybrid, custom, and multi-cloud will become more and more prevalent

At the heart of this technology trend exists a custom solution to meet the needs and concerns of these organizations, including compliance, security, and cost issues

Blending Service and Deployment Models

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DevOps has long focused on reinventing the SDLC (e.g. with CI/CD, ARA, pipeline automation etc.), while reinvention of IT Ops has lagged. However, new approaches like Site Reliability Engineering, Observability, Containerization, Operations Analytics, and ML/AI are driving a resurgence of IT Ops. In this session our expert panel will focus on how these new ideas are [putting the Ops back in DevOps orbringing modern IT Ops to DevOps].

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