The 2020s will be a pivotal decade for database management systems

Since the 1980s, at the dawn of the internet era, database management systems (DBMS) have played a key role in helping tech companies capture and analyze complex user data. At the turn of the millennium, the widespread adoption of internet use among businesses and consumers alike – coupled with the emergence of big data technologies – saw DBMS become all the more crucial to businesses.

“With the rise of internet, mobile, and internet of things technologies, business intelligence is increasingly generated with a data-driven approach,” says Feifei Li, vice president of Alibaba Group and president of Alibaba Cloud’s database products business unit. “This led to the development of big data systems and next-generation cloud-native database systems to make sense of that data.”

Twenty years later, the Covid-19 pandemic would bring about another shift in the DBMS space – one that would move a majority of them onto the cloud.

An accelerated move to cloud-native databases

The use of cloud technology for database management is not entirely new. Cloud computing service providers like Alibaba Cloud have been offering cloud database management solutions since the 2010s. However, what last year’s pandemic has brought on is a rapid cloud adoption within the DBMS industry and a migration among enterprises toward cloud-native database systems.

According to a MariaDB survey among over 500 tech leaders across the world, 40% of respondents say that Covid-19 has accelerated their move to the cloud. Global research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform. By 2023, cloud DBMS will make 50% of the total revenue of the DBMS market.

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One prime reason for this drastic shift is that the cloud allows companies to increase their capacity without having to invest in hardware or facilities. Using a cloud provider also eliminates the need to hire additional staff to maintain a database’s infrastructure. This is a crucial consideration for businesses during crises such as Covid-19, when their revenue can plummet for extended periods of time and every cent they spend or save can make a difference.

“Business workloads exhibit increasingly more dynamic patterns, with peaks and valleys changing more and more drastically,” says Li. “This is an inevitable change brought about by the pandemic, and the resulting digital transformation is also an inevitable fact.”

The hybrid cloud approach

As enterprises flock to the cloud, the most common strategy they’ve adopted is the multi-cloud approach, which enables them to maintain a hybrid cloud environment that is suited for various specialized capabilities.

For instance, businesses can choose to keep operational data on both private cloud and public cloud, depending on their needs. However, they may have more flexibility and cost-saving when using public cloud, due to its elastic and scalable nature.

However, this leads to challenges in managing data across various systems.  Hybrid cloud architectures are typically more complex and require more sophisticated cloud management tools such as Alibaba Cloud’s Database Backup Service, which helps businesses to manage hybrid-cloud architectures more effectively. However, only about one-third of enterprises currently use multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud tools, according to software management firm Flexera.

Making a name for Asia

In 2020, Gartner named Alibaba Cloud a global leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems report.

“Leaders demonstrate the most support for a broad range of DBMS use cases,” said the Gartner report. “These vendors demonstrate consistent customer satisfaction and strong customer support, [and] generally represent the lowest risk for customers in the areas of performance, scalability, reliability, and support.”

The same tech that powers Alibaba Cloud’s services were key to the success of Chinese ecommerce major Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival 2020, which saw sales worth US$74.1 billion gross merchandise value over the course of 11 days. According to Alibaba data, last year’s iteration of the sales festival saw a peak of 583,000 transactions per second.

Photo credit: Alibaba

“Traditional technologies can’t meet the requirements of such high-concurrency and high-capacity events,” says Alibaba Cloud’s Li. “It was only possible with the use of cloud-native and distributed technologies.”

As emerging Asian markets such as Indonesia continue to spawn tech firms that need to deal with large amounts of data on a daily basis, Alibaba Cloud is expanding across Asia Pacific to provide these companies with localized cloud computing solutions for their business needs.

“We want our customers to ride on the future trend, and we will continue to innovate and provide our customers with the best database technology so that together, we can build a solid foundation for their digital transformation process,” says Li.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. It provides a comprehensive suite of global computing services to startups, corporations, and government organizations worldwide.

Find out more about Alibaba Cloud’s range of cloud services here and follow the company on LinkedIn.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.