The Cloud Penalizes the Stupid and Inefficient

“The cloud penalizes the stupid and inefficient.” These words, spoken over a couple of beers at the 2015 IDUG DB2 Conference in Melbourne, Australia by a top industry executive, stopped me in my tracks - and they should do the same for you as an executive leader.

Now when I say, “the cloud,” I mean that your data is stored externally, and managed externally. Chances are your IT leadership has talked to you about it, and perhaps even persuaded you to move your databases and their management to the cloud. There are some compelling reasons on the surface to switch to a cloud-based database solution:

1. It provides flexible capacity - if you need more computing power or more storage, you simply draw from the seemingly inexhaustible capacity available in the cloud.
2. You can reduce the size of your IT department because the cloud service provider is managing parts of your IT systems (such as storage and operating systems).
3. You only pay for what you use. No need to worry about paying for excess CPUs, memory, and licenses that are underutilized. That sounds like a benefit, doesn’t it? Well, it might not be a benefit for reasons described below.

But here’s what you need to think very carefully about before moving to an external cloud-based data system:

1. Your data isn’t as safe as you think it is from mechanical failure. This headline from CNN Money says it all: “Google loses data after lightning strikes.” Now Google reported that “less than 0.000001% of its Western Europe permanent disk space was lost,” but what if that was your data?
2. You don’t know where your data is stored. Cloud vendors tout their multiple data centers as a virtue, but depending on where the data is stored, you might come to exactly the opposite conclusion.
3. You don’t know who is working on your database systems, or where they are located. If you’re at all concerned about security, the hairs on the back of your neck should have just gone up.
4. You pay for all that you use. You see - abundance leads to apathy in most areas of life. And since your database continues to be fast, you don’t pay attention to inefficient indexing and other database issues, you just consume more and more cloud resources to compensate for your progressively dysfunctional database. It’s the equivalent of congestive heart failure - your heart gets bigger and bigger to keep up until it fails. In the database world, your cloud bill gets bigger and bigger until your profit margin evaporates.

What You Must Know

The cloud can be a smokescreen to grab your profits if you let it.

If your IBM DB2 LUW database isn’t keeping up with performance demands, or if you’ve just been handed an emergency purchase request for CPUs and memory - or you want to prevent this from happening in the first place - contact us. We’ll diagnose any database problems for free in about 15 seconds, solve a problem in two hours or less, and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in CPU’s, memory, licenses, consulting fees, and wasted time. Frankly, we’re not very popular with hardware and database license vendors, but your CFO, shareholders, and customers will love us.

Free White Paper “Open in Case of Emergency:  The C-level Emergency Guide to Database Problems.” Learn how to: Control spiraling costs in an emergency. Solve business-threatening problems instantly. Cut through the fog when no one knows what to do. Download Now.

Tweet