Senior IT leaders have become the business heroes of the pandemic response by rapidly pivoting their organizations to enable safe remote working. Today, organizations must act faster than ever before on their digital transformation plans. With new data-intensive needs, businesses are now challenged to rethink their IT strategies and enable new mechanisms for agility and innovation.  New capabilities in intelligence and analytics are driving greater collaboration between machines and humans, as we’re seeing a new evolution for DBAs that enables greater impact across the business. 

In the fourth episode of our “Designed for Change” five part mini-series podcast, hosts Michael Hickins and Barb Darrow met with Julian Dontcheff, managing director and global database lead at Accenture, to discuss the future of data and its impact on the role of IT.

Listen to this podcast episode here.

Challenges with Data

With the pandemic prompting the surge of remote work and physical distancing, the digital world became critical for businesses and people to remain connected. The consequential inflation of data begged the critical question for database providers: Can current technologies keep up with this rapid growth? While challenges with data have always prevailed, COVID-19 presented new complexities for people, data, and applications. Data is being generated on the customer, what the customers bought before, loyalty programs, and even data about inventory.  As Julian Dontcheff states:  

 “You accumulate more data. The more data accumulates exponentially because of logging, because of all kinds of mechanisms which are trying to be saved into the databases.”

In the past, we’ve seen companies develop specialized databases dedicated to supporting these different purposes. However, having multiple specialized databases often creates challenges with security, data replication, backups, monitoring, and more. With the increased need of applications that may not have existed in the past, businesses need new solutions to handle these growing complexities.

The Solution: An Intelligent Cloud

The ever-growing need for remote working and social distancing has placed priority on making products and services available to anyone anywhere. This is why cloud-based solutions and increased capacity have become a necessity. The emergence of low-cost, durable cloud databases and intelligent tools are lowering the barriers to data and digital growth. According to this HBR report, intelligent automation is being used in virtually every department in the enterprise, with IT leading the way at 63%.

For decades, database administrators have been overloaded with all kinds of routine tasks – creating a database, adding a tablespace, backing up and monitoring the database, and so on. An autonomous database automatically carries out these manual functions that include securing, backing up, patching, creating, and upgrading the database. This allows DBAs to concentrate their skills on tasks that improve the quality of the database to drive greater results for the business. Furthermore, cloud computing enables instant elasticity for flexible management of resources, meaning DBAs no longer need to worry about scaling a system horizontally or vertically.

“They can concentrate more on issues which are related to the features being used in the database, how they’re being used, how they’re being configured. And what more is needed from business in order to make the application work even faster on the database.”

Powered by artificial intelligence, the modern cloud is fostering new opportunities for businesses to automate their operations, while leveraging advanced analytics for more valuable business insights.

Adapting for Change

With new intelligent advancements being delivered through cloud, we’re seeing a new generation of programmers and administrators – one that operates with unprecedented efficiency, speed, and innovation. This evolution is fostering new languages and applications, accelerating the technological maturity of today’s modern enterprises.

“And it’s the people that change this way of creating applications more rapidly, more quickly. And of course, it’s the technology that has matured so much that it also speeds up the whole process.”

Learn More

Oracle provides opportunities to design for change with:

  • Exclusive Autonomous Database and autonomous services benefits to avoid manual efforts. Ensuring higher performance, security and operational efficiencies for your team.
  • Ability to run different data types (Spatial, JSON, IoT), and workloads on a single database versus having your team manage multiple systems. This provides synergy across capabilities by having ML and spatial data in the same database to be able to do predictive analytics. Ultimately, making it easier and faster to develop data-driven applications. A broad range of database engines and deployment choices to deploy workloads wherever required.
  • Enabling new business models with big data—consolidate new and traditional data sources to create innovative business applications. Ensuring analytics are on autopilot—allowing you to implement automation and self-service to make the best possible decisions.

These are only a few of the ways in which Oracle provides opportunities to allow for agility and innovation.  Throughout the Designed for Change series, we’ll continue to explore the ways Oracle supports you no matter where you are in your digital transformation journey.