Digital transformation refers to the integration and application of digital technologies, processes, and strategies across an organization to fundamentally improve how it operates and delivers value to its customers, the business, and others. It involves leveraging digital tools, data, and technologies to automate business processes, improve customer experiences, drive innovation, and support data-driven decision-making.

The adoption and growth of digital transformation are massive, according to Statista Research. “In 2022, digital transformation spending reached USD 1.6 trillion. By 2026, global spending on digital transformation is anticipated to reach USD 3.4 trillion.” A recent Gartner study reported that digital change is an organizational priority for 87% of senior executives and CIOs, requiring additional focus on data modernization.

Why Move Mission-Critical Databases to the Cloud?

Which digital transformation project(s) to pursue depends on your specific situation and goals to ensure successful outcomes. Moving mission-critical databases to the cloud is an untapped opportunity for many organizations, and it can offer tremendous advantages if they do not face compliance and confidentiality restrictions for cloud use or do not have complex legacy entanglements that make moving too hard. Explore these key benefits of cloud migration:

#1. Faster Business Agility: The cloud removes the need for infrastructure procurement, setup, management, and maintenance. Cloud migration helps organizations respond quickly to market changes, customer demands, and competitive pressures by quickly scaling to meet business needs. This agility can lead to a competitive advantage in dynamic industries.

#2. On-Demand Scalability: Cloud elasticity is useful in environments that require the ability to scale storage and compute up or down to match demand. Cloud-native deployments that offer cloud elasticity can ensure optimal performance even during peak usage periods, such as retail during busy holiday shopping or government at tax time.

#3. Greater Sustainability: The shared infrastructure of cloud providers allows for better economies of scale because they can distribute the cost of data centers, cooling systems, and other resources efficiently among many customers. And, instead of over-provisioning infrastructure in their own data center to handle occasional spikes in demand, organizations can dynamically adjust resources in the cloud, minimizing waste.

#4. Optimized User Experience: Regional data centers of cloud providers allow organizations to host databases closer to end users for better performance, responsiveness, and availability of applications. This is especially useful when low latency and quick data access are critical, such as electronic commerce, online gaming, live streaming, and interactive web applications.

#5. Stronger Security and Compliance: Major cloud providers invest significantly in physical security, network security, and data center protections that should keep mission-critical databases safe, provided organizations adhere to best practices for implementation and security. In addition, cloud providers often offer compliance certifications for various regulatory standards that can help simplify the process of adhering to industry regulations and requirements.

#6. Improved Backup and Recovery: The cloud allows organizations to create backups and implement disaster recovery more efficiently. This is crucial for safeguarding mission-critical data against unforeseen events such as data corruption, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters.

#7. Staff Optimization: Many database vendors offer managed or co-managed services in the cloud. These may include taking care of tasks such as provisioning, scaling, hardware maintenance, software patches, upgrades, backups, query optimization, table and index management, application tuning, and more. This leaves teams more time to focus on strategic initiatives with higher business value.

How Actian Supports Migration of Mission-Critical Databases to the Cloud

Actian recognizes that mission-critical database migration to the cloud represents one of the most exciting digital transformation opportunities, making a high impact on business agility, scalability, sustainability, data protection, and staff optimization. This is why we developed the Ingres NeXt Initiative to provide businesses with flexible options for infrastructure, software, and management of the Ingres database or Actian X running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. Our cloud migration approach minimizes risk, protects business logic, lowers costs, reduces time and effort, and decreases business disruption.

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