7 Ways Database Consolidation Services Will Modernize Your IT Estate and Lower Your Costs
Over the last two-plus years we saw an acceleration of cloud migrations as companies adapted to the pandemic and developed new ways of operating. But with all this movement to the cloud, it can be easy to forget that on-premises environments are still deeply entrenched in the enterprise. In fact, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky recently estimated that maybe only 10% of IT has moved to the cloud, noting that we’re still at the beginning stages of cloud computing.
Many enterprises are riddled with legacy systems and database sprawl that have accumulated costs and technical debt over the years. Migrating these environments to the cloud is not a simple exercise—there are performance, technical and other business requirements to consider. Additionally, not all infrastructure will end up in the cloud, as certain workloads will need to remain on-premises for security, performance or other reasons.
As IT leaders consider their options, many are taking advantage of outside expertise and database consolidation services to help guide their digital transformation strategy. Let’s dive into how these services can help your business.
What Are Database Consolidation Services?
At a high-level, database consolidation services help you to maximize your investment in your existing IT estate and implement the right database strategy and platforms to support your business in a design that addresses your on-premises, hybrid or cloud requirements and goals.
An end-to-end database consolidation service guides you through the entire migration and consolidation process from the initial assessment of your IT estate to migration. This includes everything from platform recommendations, proofs of concepts (POCs) and architecture development to implementation and ongoing testing, to name a few. The right database consolidation service should also be database agnostic—meaning you will have access to expertise across a broad range of databases to support your business, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, IBM Db2 or another database.
7 Benefits of Database Consolidation Services
Databases serve as the underlying engine of your business, so getting a handle on where they should reside and the right architecture, tools and methods to manage and scale growth is central to your success. If done right, you can reap the rewards on a number of levels. With that said, here are seven ways you can benefit from database consolidation services:
- Ease of management – Database sprawl is a real problem. Different teams within a company install various applications to fulfil their job responsibilities, and before you know it, you can have tens, hundreds or even thousands of database servers on your network. Database consolidation services allow you to eliminate database sprawl by reviewing and grouping databases into smaller sets of servers—significantly reducing the number of instances that require management at both the database and OS level. Additionally, with a smaller number of servers, you can make sure you’re running a standard version of database and OS systems across your environment, simplifying management complexity even further.
- Reduced or no licensing costs – Legacy vendors impose significant database OS licensing costs on users. So, if you’re running tens, hundreds or thousands of databases, it doesn’t take long for those licensing costs to add up. If you move to an open-source database platform on the cloud, you can break free entirely from licensing fees. But if that’s not the right strategy for your business, you can still achieve net savings on licensing by reducing the number of database instances throughout your environment, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
- Optimized staffing – With fewer databases to manage, you might not need as many database administrators on staff—helping you save on personnel costs. Or, better yet, you’ll have a newfound opportunity to reallocate staff previously responsible for database management to other IT projects that drive business value.
- Lower support costs – In addition to costly licensing structures, many vendors charge additional fees for extended support on old systems. And, chances are, if you have a sprawling database estate, some of your servers are running older, unsupported software. Modernization is a key part of any database consolidation project, providing the perfect opportunity to remove obsolete or outdated database and OS versions that require extended support fees.
- Better security and compliance – By gaining a full view and assessment of your database environments, you can remove obsolete or outdated database and OS versions that are no longer supported by the vendor, thus helping you reduce security risks and improve compliance. Also, fewer database instances and servers means it’s much easier to keep up with system updates and security patches—allowing you to build and maintain a strong security and compliance posture.
- Reduced CapEx and power consumption – Paying to run servers in a data centre can become costly, especially with today’s global energy prices. If you can consolidate the number of databases and servers on-prem or move them to the cloud, then you can significantly lower CapEx and power consumption costs. Consider the benefits achieved by Penske Australia & New Zealand. By moving their Oracle estate to the cloud, the company is now saving approximately $80,000 annually—more than $60,000 in hardware maintenance costs and nearly $20,000 in power consumption costs by reducing its data centre footprint.
- Aligned to business requirements – Database consolidation projects aren’t just about modernizing your databases. They also offer a unique opportunity to rearchitect your IT infrastructure to provide best-fit database solutions that align with your business needs. The right database consolidation services partner will begin your project with an assessment workshop to understand the business requirements for each and every database and application—addressing key areas such as recovery point objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs) and availability/uptime. From there, they’ll design new infrastructure that aligns with these requirements while helping you achieve your overall modernization goals.
To learn more about Navisite’s Database Consolidation Service, read our data sheet or contact us today.
Lee is a senior manager in Navisite’s Professional Services practice and is responsible for all database projects both in the cloud and on-premises, ranging from small database assessments to consolidations and major cloud moves with a focus on customer success and business alignment. Lee has more than 15 years of experience working with database technologies and holds various technical and leadership roles across different managed service providers resulting in the transformation of hundreds of database environments.