Everyone is talking about the cloud these days, and everything must be in the cloud. But for some organizations and their stakeholders, it is still a step into the unknown. And they may have questions and doubts about whether their environments are suitable for a (partial) move to the cloud. In this article, I would like to provide a little more information about the options available to you, when you are considering moving your on-premises database to a cloud solution. In a phased approach, moving your data to the cloud is a good starting point.
The advantages of moving your on-premises data to cloud are commonly known, a short summary of the main advantages:
- Cost effectiveness
- Pay only for what you need
- Reduced storage infrastructure hardware and maintenance costs
- High availability and durability
- Scalability
Be aware that it is about moving to the same database vendor in the cloud, not migrating to a different target RDBMS in the cloud. Because here there would be many more combinations possible. With very specific limitations or technical difficulties that need to be considered.
I limit the scope to the following 4 RDBMS Systems: SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 for LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows) and PostgreSQL. And following big cloud players: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. But there are of course many more players on the market.
(1) Partnership between OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) and Microsoft Azure
(2) Buy Your Own License
(3) The DB2 database must be setup and maintained by yourself with limited managed services support
(4) IBM has its own IBM Db2® on Cloud managed database service
As you can see, almost anything is possible, and choosing a particular path is a decision that needs to be well thought out. There are many arguments to consider and defining a data strategy will help you with this. So it is indeed easier said than done!
For more detailed or specific information on the options available to your organization. Nemeon can be your partner in creating a data inventory or data strategy and guide you on your journey in or to the cloud.