75 Percent of Databases Will Be Cloud-Based in Three Years

According to new data management usage projections by analyst house Gartner, Inc., 75 percent of databases will be cloud-based in three years. The prediction, which comes from Gartner’s The Future of the DBMS Market Is Cloud ($) claims that while three-in-four databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, only 5 percent will ever be considered for repatriation to on-prem. The researcher believes this trend will be due, in large part, to databases used for analytics, as well as the continued proliferation of the SaaS model.

Global database management system (DBMS) revenue grew roughly 18 percent in 2018. Cloud DBMS revenue accounted for nearly 70 percent of that growth however, with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services making up more than three-quarters of it. Gartner believes that these trends portend that cloud service provider infrastructures and the services that run on them are quickly becoming the industry standard for data management.

Cloud service providers have done an excellent job embracing the ecosystems that are beginning to form around them, both in terms of integrating services within a single platform and providing early steps toward what Gartner calls “intercloud data management.” The projection does note a small layer of growth for on-prem database products. However, Gartner believes the bulk of that revenue growth is due to price increases and forced upgrades as opposed to new deployments.

Cloud data warehousing enabled users to achieve improved performance and position them to better take advantage of new cloud technologies. However, implementation troubles remain prevalent among those that don’t utilize all the best practices at their disposal. Complexity too remains a major issue. There’s also a growing need for better integration with third-party analytics and BI software.

Gartner’s June Cool Vendors in Data Management, 2019 features several up-and-coming providers that line up with this cloud-based data management worldview that is developing in the enterprise, and we encourage you to read it.