75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider

Databases are moving to the cloud but Azure is expensive, Google has suspect support, and AWS is blinkered about multicloud, Gartner has observed in its latest Magic Quadrant. Gartner's report, co-authored by five analysts, has made "strategic assumptions" that by 2022 "75 per cent of all databases will be deployed or migrated …

[alain williams]

Heads in the cloud ?

They also noted that Oracle Database on-premises has a reputation for being "expensive and difficult to manage,"

They forgot to add "more secure". You might misconfigure access but if it is only visible from within the organisation then you are less likely to be the next Talk Talk or Equifax.

I know that many software vendors are pushing cloud because they get to charge more fees that way - but not everyone wants cloud.

[oiseau]

Re: Heads in the cloud ?

If your company really needs that amount/type of storage, it must to invest in the right things.

ie: on premises equipment, personnel, knowhow and training.

The much touted expense/cost is nothing but investment in security, reliability and independence, among other important things.

And the supposedly "expensive and difficult to manage", a favourite of the bloody bean counters who should not be allowed to opine with respect to such decisions, ends up being peanuts when the proverbial shit hits the fan and clean up time comes.

eg: Talk Talk, Equifax and a host of other examples which we have not heard about

Cloud?

Be sure it will, sooner or later, rain on you.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, SAP, IBM (and others)?

Be sure that given the chance, they'll screw you over.

Twice, if it means more money.

O.

[teknopaul]

Re: Heads in the cloud ?

I suspect those numbers are pulled out of garters arse. If you are on prem with an open source db, or even in a self built vm or container in the cloud, how would gartner know?

If you have a website how do garner estimate how many dbs you have behind the scenes processing logs or even just managing your contact list.

I have more databases on my phone than in the cloud. That 75% figure means absolutely nothing.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: Heads in the cloud ?

I'm basically waiting for someone to come along and go "cloud is so expensive, do it yourself for a tenth the price" - the same as the PC revolution more or less killed timesharing and mainframes.

Because it'll happen, don't worry. The cycle of reinvention is the one thing we can rely on in this business.

[Richard Crossley]

Gartner

Over the years, I've learned to take what they say with a pinch of salt.

[RM Myers]

Re: Gartner

Personally, I would up that to a salt mine (a large salt mine, at that). Gartner's level of male bovine manure production puts them in a class with most politicians.

[Wellyboot]

Re: Gartner

Gartner & salt mine, there's a convergence many would like to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gartner

Totally agree - they've understood their market well though. Take a topic that can be quite complicated, make a Trump-esque like graphical simplification of it and present as expensive analyses to the Management Higher-Ups. They haven't got time to waste on detail!

(Plus they now have the get-out clause of 'Gartner said'!)

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Context?

I’m struggling to understand the context here. What are they considering as databases? I have 5 MySQL databases on a shared hosting platform for Joomla and Wordpress based sites. If they are talking about those types of databases then it’s no wonder it’s so high. If you take those out and focus on corporate organisations then I’d wager it will be much lower.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Context?

I'm assuming that that wouldn't count as "cloud" if they are to provide an Internet service.

By cloud, I'm thinking of a company outsourcing the database for it's internal systems - where the only use of the Internet is for access from the company to the cloud provider.

[werdsmith]

Re: Context?

The distinction between a cloud database like an RDS one, and a cloud vm hosting your own OS and database license is important, because the latter is barely any different from an on premise one, from the application support perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Context?

What about SqlLite and friends - don't these count as databases?

Huge numbers of applications contain an SqlLite database or similar, including several in my mobile phone and at least one in the Firefox browser that I am using to type this comment.

There are literally billions of these small databases in hundreds of millions of devices, including routers, phones, microcontrollers, printers, PCs etc. Are they all moving to the cloud too?

[Gordon 10]

Gartners categorisation is getting more obscure by the day.

This seems overly skewed towards the cloud infrastructure considerations rather than the actual databases that run on top of it.

How the heck did Google get up that high for its databases? (BigQuery is great - but its hardly a market leader)

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

Gartner Goop

Leave it to Gartner to just extrapolate curves and say that current trends will continue, while CEOs pay them megabucks for it so they can cover their arses. Nice work if you can get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

All databases?

By all databases, does that include all the shitty SMB apps using SQL Express (if lucky, own arcane data format if not)? Some insist the DB has to be on the same server for {reasons}. Others fall in a heap with the latency on a LAN, so good luck accessing them from the cloud.

[Kev99]

Note to security people. A cloud, as everyone with any brains knows, is a bunch of holes held together with vapor.

[werdsmith]

I guess you are a racking and cabling hands on sysadmin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody has to be.

Turns out it's not actually clouds all the way down, y'know.

[deadlockvictim]

Magical Thinking

When dealing with Gartner's Magical Quadrant, I reckon that it was put together with magical thinking.

Probably in Excel too.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Many companies will fail

By moving towards the Cloud and letting go all their system administrators companies are trying to save money and make more profit. But this will lead to non qualified personnel managing the company's data and we'll see more and more unsecured databases appearing on the database.

We've already seen some examples of this where people leave S3 buckets wide open containing ALL the data of said companies.

This in turn will lead to companies failing.

IMHO moving towards the Cloud is a disaster in waiting.

[werdsmith]

Re: Many companies will fail

Most cloud migrations I've seen for medium enterprises and bigger are just a moving of infrastructure to another data centre(s) and the only thing that has changed much is that there is less physical racking and cabling and less environmental control and physical security.

The companies maintain their sysadmins, network security and other staff as the infrastructure is still there, it has just moved. And where previously people sat at their desks or at home fiddling with firewall rules, backups, cron jobs, performance problems and account permissions remotely, now with cloud they are doing exactly the same. Just without the cages, air con failures ad fiddly sliding rack mounts.

Lift and drop of legacy applications is quite normal.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Re: Many companies will fail

That's not my experience with Cloud migrations.

They usually fire all the sysadmins and assume their role will be taken over by the Cloud provider. By the time they find out that this isn't the case they'll either let some developer take on that role in addition to their normal duties or put it in the hands of some non-technical person, with all the risks that entails.

[werdsmith]

Re: Many companies will fail

It's hard to imagine people being so negligent with hundreds of thousands of whatever currency. I guess we are working in different kinds of business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Many companies will fail

Newsflash: some executives are idiots.

Just because they have a fancy title and a nice big office, doesn't mean they know what they're doing.

[steviebuk]

Still don't believe anything Gartner has to say

Not after their, was it praise? For the credit agency that had the massive data leak

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud is good or bad

I find the criticism of cloud tiresome. I find the hype of cloud tiresome too

The future, in my view, will be a hybrid world where - astonishingly - the right technology will be used for the right job.

Gartner just needs to sell some reports, which is why you end up with this jumble of definitions. I'm rather surprised they let this particular quadrant out into the wild.

[David Lawton]

Gartner.... the same company that said in 2011 that Windows mobile would surpass iPhone in market share by 2015.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud first policy

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-cloud-first-policy