The unpleasant truths about database-as-a-service

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The recent announcement of Amazon.com’s Redshift — and other cloud-delivered databases, for that matter — makes it clear we’re moving to a future where some or even most of our data will exist in public clouds. Although the cost savings are compelling, I believe this migration will happen much more slowly than cloud providers predict. Indeed, for the Global 2000, cloud-based data stores will initially be a very hard sell, though the poorer small businesses won’t have any other choice, economically speaking.

That said, there are a few problems you need to consider before you load your data onto USB drives and ship it to a cloud computing data center. First and foremost, you’re dumping your data onto USB drives, when are then dropped off at UPS. No kidding — it’s too much data to upload. There are other problems to consider as well…

Ongoing data integration with on-premise data stores is a problem. Although a one-time movement of data is a pain, it’s not an ongoing issue. But cloud-based data stores aren’t static repositories, so enterprises that need to migrate data weekly, daily, hourly, or even in real time will have their work cut out for them. They must figure out data-integration mechanisms that work consistently. In some cases, when there is too much data to move, it will be impractical to use cloud-based databases…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/the-unpleasant-truths-about-database-service-208450