Today's modern managed services can free up your teams to do the work that can help the business grow, evolve, and stay ahead of the competition.
gettyDigital transformation is more urgent than ever to stay ahead of the competition. As your business moves critical workloads to the cloud, here is how managed services—particularly for databases—can empower IT teams to focus on more valuable, innovative work.
This year of change and unpredictability has brought focus to enterprise digital transformation journeys, which have become more urgent for a lot of businesses. There’s no room for error when using data to respond to customers faster, to bring differentiated products to market, and to increase revenue.
This shift has increased the pressure on enterprise IT teams. They’re tasked with driving new innovation to stay ahead of the competition and meet changing customer demands, all while they manage to keep the lights on. This has led to an exodus of business-critical workloads from legacy infrastructure to the cloud to help aid this digital transformation. While simply lifting and shifting existing systems to cloud infrastructure may seem like the path of least resistance, it can actually hinder your ability to solve the digital transformation puzzle.
Databases are one of the highest-stakes components of enterprise IT infrastructure. As your business moves to the cloud, you’re faced with a critical choice for these databases—whether to have your team self-manage them in the cloud or to adopt fully managed cloud services. The difference here can be profound. Not only can self-managing require similar levels of operational attention and maintenance as managing on-premises deployments, but this work depends on scarce and valuable company resources, like database administrators, ops team members, and software developers. This can slow down your overall development velocity, reduce business impact where it really matters, and open your business up to unnecessary risks.
Your teams need to be able to explore, experiment, and think big without the burden of operations and maintenance.
Fully managed cloud services take care of the nontrivial and resource-intensive operational aspects, so valuable teams are free to focus on driving new applications and innovations. It’s no wonder the popularity for such services is rapidly growing: “The cloud managed service market is forecast to reach $80 billion by 2024, growing at a five-year CAGR of 17.5% in U.S. dollars,” according to the February 2020 Gartner Forecast Analysis: Cloud Managed Services, Worldwide report. That forecast also found that “by 2025, 90% of large organizations with legacy applications in the cloud will use external service providers for some portion of management and support.”
How managed services can move businesses forward
The growth of managed services has been driven by organizations that have complex digital environments and are looking to become more agile and more operationally sound, quickly. A modern managed service goes beyond automating all the operational aspects of database management—like patching, upgrades, and scalability—and enables you to run more secure, more complex deployments.
With fully managed services, cloud administrators can spin up a highly complex, fault-tolerant global setup with just a few button clicks. It’s hard to overstate how many years of work this adds up to. In the past, it would’ve taken countless IT team hours to do just one task, such as set up a replicated database across two continents, then manage availability while troubleshooting network issues or hardware failures.
“The cloud managed service market is forecast to reach $80 billion by 2024, growing at a five-year CAGR of 17.5% in U.S. dollars.”
That type of investment and time can now be spent on entirely more impactful, innovative work—not to mention that the databases themselves are more reliable, easier to scale, and can work a lot faster than in those manual scenarios of the past. The building blocks are stronger and more resilient—and if something does need attention, the cloud provider takes care of it.
At Google, we’ve been in the data business—and the business of reliability—for a long time. We bring many years of experience keeping things running securely and smoothly across billions of users—and that expertise is built into our products. The automation, processes, and database management skills involved complement your teams’ skills and knowledge about your business and the needs of your customers—ultimately helping your teams do better work.
Your teams need to be able to explore, experiment, and think big without the burden of operations and maintenance. Without the ability to hand off tasks to today’s modern managed services, your teams will always be playing catch-up. Free them up to do the work that can help the business grow, evolve, and stay ahead of the competition.
Take the next steps: On November 12, Google Cloud launched Database Migration Service. Here’s how it works and how to get started.
