Cloud databases provide scalable, agile, and cost-efficient solutions essential for staying competitive. They enable businesses to access and manage data from anywhere, streamline operations, and quickly adapt to changing market demands.
When deciding to implement a cloud database, there are a variety of factors you need to consider to select the system that best meets your needs. Today, we explore the pros and cons of cloud databases and guide you on how to:
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Choose the right database management model for your growing business needs
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Evaluate factors that can impact financial decisions, including costs associated with capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX)
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Determine the best ways to ensure data protection
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Ensure compliance with local, regional, and international laws
In the past, databases were on-premises systems, available on local machines and accessed via a LAN connection to an in-house server. As big data continues to take over and the databases needed to manage it become ever more complex, interest in cloud databases is at an all-time high..
Like any database, a cloud database aggregates and manages structured or unstructured data. More specifically, a cloud-based provider builds and deploys databases on a cloud platform instead of an on-premises server. A cloud-based deployment makes the data accessible via the internet anywhere. Your provider will also handle database management through an internet connection.
Within the cloud, businesses may run the database in a self-managed way with virtual machines that they must configure, maintain, and update themselves. Another cloud database option is a fully managed database solution, commonly referred to as a database-as-a-service (DBaaS). With a DBaaS, the vendor provides the business access to the database and takes care of the setup, configuration, and most of the maintenance and administrative tasks associated with running it.
Some DBaaS, like DataStax Astra DB, handle operational workloads, managing the vast amounts of data needed by applications in your business' day-to-day operations. With Astra DB's change data capture (CDC) capabilities, companies can stream their data to another DBaaS like Snowflake, which is ideal for analytical workloads, such as machine learning, and to derive business intelligence.
Who is using cloud databases?
Cloud databases do not come as a one-size-fits-all solution, which means they're flexible enough to suit different industries with unique needs. For example, financial services use cloud databases to support a wide variety of business needs. They allow organizations to interact with billing and accounting services while providing simpler audit trails and centralized safekeeping. Financial service organizations also take advantage of cloud databases to create better customer experiences. One example is Endowus, which leverages its cloud-based Apache Cassandra® database with Astra DB to understand its customers’ financial services needs better.
Many companies in the technology sector are using cloud databases to serve the needs of a variety of industries. For example, Barracuda Networks offers a cloud-based, Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) network, which protects companies from malware, ransomware, targeted attacks, and zero-day threats worldwide. Barracuda's ATP network uses Apache Cassandra as the underlying database for its ATP network and Astra DB, a DBaaS built on Cassandra, to simplify its operation and management.
These are just a couple of examples of how businesses use cloud databases. Companies in a wide variety of industries, including travel and hospitality, e-commerce, and gaming, also integrate cloud-based database solutions in ways that help them to grow their businesses. The bottom line is that cloud databases allow data-driven businesses to mobilize data in real-time and build smart and scalable applications for unbeatable efficiency.
Pros of a strong cloud database
The functionality and features of cloud databases vary significantly depending on the vendor you choose and the management model they provide. Many businesses find the benefits of using a database as a service far outweigh the benefits of managing their own cloud databases.
In fact, there are many key advantages that make DBaaS an attractive alternative to traditional on-premise solutions. Here’s a brief look at some of the compelling reasons that sway business owners to opt for cloud databases:
Scalability
On-premises databases quickly pressure a company's time and financial resources with increasing workloads and much-needed redundancy. Scaling hardware, IT personnel, and energy comes with significant costs. The scalability of cloud databases eliminates this burden.
Theoretically, there are no limits to cloud database scalability. However, the reality is that providers intertwine scalability costs with growing resource allocation. That means the more you use, the more you pay..
Cost
Pricing for cloud database systems varies depending on the cloud vendors you use. Pricing models come in several types, including:
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Subscription pricing: Users pay the same amount monthly
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ay-per-use: Pay for what you need or use,
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Hybrid pricing: Combine elements of subscription and pay-per-use models
Cloud databases eliminate investment costs for expensive on-site server setups. Similarly, outsourcing storage to a cloud provider saves you from paying a team of dedicated in-house IT professionals to maintain it.
Additional costs to consider are those associated with upgrades and management of your database. DBaaS solutions such as Astra DB significantly reduce the maintenance and administration costs and eliminate the expenses associated with upgrades. With less time spent on troubleshooting, your technical teams can spend more time on tasks that drive more value to the business, including application development or product design.
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery is a set of activities or measures taken by database operators to restore the data after a natural disaster. NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra and Astra DB, a DBaaS built on Cassandra, systematically reduce the risk of system failure by hosting the databases on external devices and creating automatic backup files.
Providers offer different solutions to create database backups for applications running on the cloud and compute nodes. They also ensure backup storage in more than one location and different zones for high availability and geographical fault tolerance.
Plus, the ability of cloud databases to automatically generate backup files is another excellent advantage that incentivizes businesses to invest in the cloud.
Accessibility
Cloud databases offer better accessibility than on-premises systems, especially for businesses operating in multiple regions. If the cloud databases you use support synchronization, your IT staff can access data from anywhere and at any time, as long as they have an internet connection.
For companies that require team members working in different time zones, this uninterrupted accessibility is a blessing. It provides you with better cross-regional collaboration while minimizing avoidable downtime for your company. Employees can work with equal efficiency whether they are home or abroad.
Cloud databases also help you simplify application development because they allow your team to create and destroy databases as needed during the development stage. Accessibility through the cloud means they no longer have to wait for your IT department to provision a VM or a database for testing. This accessibility not only reduces complexity but also accelerates time to market for new applications.
The cons of a subpar cloud database
As beneficial as it is to adopt the services of a cloud provider to manage your company's data, opting for a subpar cloud database creates more problems than it solves. For instance, some providers impose restrictions on per-field storage ability or indexing and offer limited datatype definitions. And a cloud database architected with a single point of failure is an invitation for trouble. Depending on the vendor, you might also face scaling limitations.
Vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in is a contract where a business relies on a specific vendor because switching is difficult or costly.. Companies using AWS Relational Database Service might find it difficult to migrate to another cloud provider, as AWS does not support cross-cloud database migrations natively. Similarly, organizations using Oracle’s Autonomous Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure might encounter obstacles due to proprietary features that do not easily transfer to other platforms.
Different vendors support different formats and migration tools, so changing providers can lead to significant expenses and operational disruptions, especially if you try to move your entire infrastructure to another cloud service.
This is why you must consider both your current and future cloud platform needs. You should also carefully evaluate the pricing structures and migration options of different vendors before committing to a single cloud provider or adopting a multi-cloud strategy.
Downtime
Downtime or outage refers to data inaccessibility caused by various factors. Common causes of cloud outage include network failures, misconfigurations, software bugs, upgrade failures, unexpected traffic loads, and power failures.
For example, in 2021, an AWS outage disrupted major services like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon's own e-commerce platform. Businesses experienced hours of downtime, resulting in financial losses and frustrated customers. Incidents like this highlight how even brief outages impact revenue, reputation, and customer trust.
Regular backups, like virtual machine snapshots and a carefully planned disaster recovery (DR) strategy, can reduce downtime. Organizations must also test these DR strategies on a routine basis. Moreover, modern DevOps and GitOps configuration styles are more reliable than manual setups. Organizations can build an exact copy of a specific resource during disaster recovery scenarios with these methods.
Vulnerability
Inefficient data management options in cloud computing lead to costly data breaches. While major cloud providers like Google Cloud and AWS have robust security mechanisms, they handle security only for the underlying infrastructure. That means you are responsible for securing your own database if you put it on top of their infrastructure. Such setups have human programming errors, which are the primary reason for data breaches instead of criminal intrusions.
Another concern is that providers format cloud databases logically for multi-tenancy, which means that there's only one database and the access control to the data of one tenant happens via software. This vulnerability opens up the possibility that one tenant could gain access to the data of another tenant.
One way to address this is to spawn one database per tenant. However, even this model is exploitable if an attacker is able to gain control of the underlying system. That unauthorized access could make the underlying network and other databases vulnerable to attack.
Established cloud database vendors offer security features that mitigate the vulnerabilities associated with multi-tenancy, including virtual private cloud (VPC) peering, IP whitelisting, strong authentication, and data encryption schemes. These features also work to make data breaches difficult and less destructive when they do occur.
Lack of compliance
When it comes to data management, problems in compliance can prove costly for your business. Failure to protect user data tarnishes your business's reputation and can also lead to fines or lawsuits. In 2017, Equifax lost the sensitive personal information of more than 150 million individuals due to an unpatched Apache Struts framework in one of its databases. Later, the credit agency had to pay $575 million in a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The best way to avoid compliance problems is to know your and your vendor's responsibilities as a shared platform. You must conduct routine audits, manage information access, watch for any lapses, and promptly fix the discovered vulnerabilities.
Ways to improve cloud database performance
There are a number of ways you can bring out the best of cloud databases. The features available in Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL database built for the cloud, make it reliable, high-performing, quick, and scalable.
Running clusters as needed
Any production system is prone to the unpredictability of traffic. Without running clusters, any business should have the ability to predict traffic patterns accurately. Otherwise, they'll either pay for way more server capacity than they need during a low-demand period or remain unavailable to their customers during periods of high demand.
Cassandra can consistently and seamlessly scale to tens of terabytes at a moment’s notice. Also, you get outstanding performance under heavy loads. Its open-source nature prevents you from vendor lock-in. You can easily overcome downtime problems by reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes.
These attributes have made Cassandra a pivotal part of the data infrastructures of several Fortune 100 companies.
VPC peering
Cassandra users (including those who use a managed Cassandra solution like Astra DB) also benefit from VPC peering, which enhances data security by providing private peering between two or more VPC networks. This technique isolates traffic from the public internet, which, in addition to the security benefits, can also save on network transit costs.
Database users introduce their encryption key management, use sophisticated authentication, and opt for security assertion markup language (SAML) single sign-on (SSO) integration with the identity provider. You can also benefit from VPN-level security using a two-way certificate validation.
Data APIs
An application programming interface (API) is a set of functions that enables applications to access data and interact with external software components, microservices, and operating systems. Database APIs enable communication between an application and a database management system. They save developers from coding solutions from scratch to connect their applications to their databases.
Stargate.io is an open-source data gateway built for Cassandra. You can deploy Stargate APIs between your applications and your Cassandra databases. Currently, Stargate offers four APIs to help you work easily and efficiently with your data in Cassandra:
API compatibility and Cassandra developer tools will also help you avoid vendor lock-in problems. You can deploy on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while maintaining compatibility with open-source Cassandra. You can also meet state-specific regulations while retaining data sovereignty.
The way forward
Cloud databases can raise your company's agility, scalability, and security while lowering operational costs and risks. Migrating to a DBaaS enhances those benefits even further. You can focus on developing great products and services as a cloud provider manages your infrastructure worries.
Indeed, Cassandra is an excellent database offering a wide array of features for modern applications, including unparalleled performance and scalability. However, it can be complex to set up and maintain, which is why more businesses turn to Astra DB, a fully managed DBaaS built on Cassandra.
Astra DB allows you to leverage all the benefits of Cassandra while enjoying the freedom and flexibility that only a multi-cloud, open source technology can provide. And Astra DB's pay-as-you-go model can reduce the total cost of ownership because it allows you to run Cassandra clusters exactly when needed.
If you're ready to take the next step on your cloud journey, check out Astra DB. You can register for free and get up to 80 GB monthly at no cost!
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FAQs:
1. What are cloud-based database solutions, and how do they work?
Cloud-based database solutions are database services hosted on a cloud computing platform like Google Cloud, Azure SQL Database, or IBM Cloud Databases. They store data remotely in data centers, offering high availability, automated backups, and managed database services without requiring a dedicated operations team.
2. How do cloud databases compare to traditional relational databases?
Unlike relational databases that run on on-premise SQL Server or Oracle Database, cloud databases are scalable and require less maintenance. Cloud-based solutions like Cloud SQL or Oracle Autonomous Database provide serverless document database options, high performance, and seamless integration with cloud computing services.
3. What are the benefits of using a fully managed database service?
A fully managed service offloads database management tasks to the cloud provider, handling backup orchestration, high availability, disaster recovery, and automatically replicating workloads.. Astra DB offers a fully managed database experience powered by Apache Cassandra, providing scalability, global replication, and built-in resilience, allowing businesses to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
4. What are the risks of vendor lock-in with cloud databases?
Many cloud service providers offer proprietary solutions like Azure Database, Google Cloud SQL, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which may lead to vendor lock-in. Businesses using these services may face migration challenges if they switch providers, making multi-cloud strategies an essential consideration.
5. What is the best cloud database for scalability and performance?
For businesses that prioritize scalability, fault tolerance, and real-time performance, Astra DB stands out as the top choice. Powered by Apache Cassandra, Astra DB can handle massive amounts of data across globally distributed environments with minimal downtime. Its advanced replication and linear scaling capabilities ensure consistent performance, making it a reliable solution for applications that require high availability and responsiveness.
For other specific use cases :
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Structured data: Consider PostgreSQL Database or MySQL Server Instances on Google Cloud or Azure SQL Database.
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NoSQL and schema-less databases: MongoDB Atlas (document database) or IBM Cloud Databases are popular options.
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Real-time analytics: In-memory data store solutions like Azure Cache or highly connected datasets in data warehouses may suit your needs.
