If you work for a large or growing business, the chances are that its databases and associated server instances have grown rapidly in the last few years. As part of an explosion in data collection, online business, and the digitisation of how we all work, businesses are relying more than ever on their IT systems.
A consequence of this growth is quite likely that the management and monitoring processes you put in place are now struggling to keep up. Whether the tools that you use can no longer cope, users are seeing poor performance, or you can no longer manage the quantity of instances you have, growing and scalable databases can be tricky to handle.
Here, we’ll take a look at what happens when your database monitoring and management needs grow far beyond what you first anticipated:
Rising Costs
It seems obvious that a growing database system would come with higher costs - but this problem can be exacerbated by inadequate monitoring and management tools.
From spiralling licensing costs for platform features that you may not even be using, to paying for too much cloud computing or local resourcing because you can’t accurately assess your needs, having poor monitoring can cost your business a lot of money.
Limited Expansion Potential
A system stretched to its limits is one which will struggle with any continued expansion.
If your business is expecting growth in the future, your database and its servers need the ability to adapt and grow with it. Without the ability to scale, and without the tools to accommodate that growth, your business could struggle in the future. Poor system performance, lower service availability, and unhappy customers and staff are the result of a business that has outgrown its database servers.
A Poorly Maintained Server
Without the tools in place to allow you to monitor and manage your large and ever-growing database, your options for maintenance and health-checking will be limited.
A schedule of health checks, report production, automated and preventative maintenance and performance monitoring is vital for the long-term health of your system, but those things aren’t possible without tools capable of working with a system as large as yours.
Weakened Security Measures
Database management tools appropriate to the size of your database and the number of instances that you work with give you full control over wide-ranging security measures.
From encryption and certification through to role-based access controls, the security measures provided by database management tools are essential for both keeping your business’s data and infrastructure safe from external threats and controlling usage from within your company.
The Solution
To avoid the problems associated with inadequate management and monitoring of your database servers - ineffective security, low maintenance, spiralling costs and no room for growth - it’s important to make use of the right tools.
Tools for scalable databases should be able to operate across thousands of instances at once, granting you full access and control to all of your database servers both locally and virtually. With automated reporting and maintenance, control over security, resourcing and licensing, these tools can help you to properly maintain your systems even as they continue to grow long into the future.
