3 Reasons Your DB2 Environment Is Becoming Partly Cloudy

Existing traditional data models are going through transformations as Big Data, NoSQL, and Cloud Database as a Service capabilities rapidly take business to new heights.  New business models are quickly changing the world with 55-person companies like WhatsApp scaling worldwide to disrupt/replace traditional businesses and services.  Businesses can be created that serve millions of customers’ billions of transactions by dynamically scaling across the world through the new cloud infrastructures.

Management, paranoid at being disrupted or replaced, is demanding the rapid incorporation of these new data management concepts, techniques, and practices within their organizations. This is why these big data, cloud and elastic web scalability data management options are quickly funded, piloted, and adopted.  It is a matter of life or death for the business to stay up with the competition and/or any new startup business that might come along.

The following are three areas that you can do with your existing and future DB2 Family systems to address and incorporate these new cloud data management requirements.

1. Communicate that your DB2 architecture can scale across the world.  As I mentioned last week, DB2 systems can be quickly scaled and extended to the new IBM clouds.  Through the BLU for Cloud, BlueMix, and other new enterprise IBM cloud offerings, your existing infrastructure or a new business unit’s infrastructure can leverage these new business models and their elastic capacity capabilities.  Your management does not know about these new options for your existing DB2 systems.  Make sure to communicate them to the CIO, CEO, and other top management levels so that your DBA and development groups can start prototyping and demonstrating these latest valuable flexible options.
2. Leverage existing and new infrastructure to support these new initiatives.  Your data management structures and practices have new challenges as monitoring of health, house, car, and other internet of things as they come online.  DB2 Version 11’s new JSON capabilities and the various cloud options help your existing data management practices evaluate and incorporate new ideas such as local device storage, and sync frequency; and share data access across devices, applications and platforms.  The DB2 Family with its compatibility and scalability efforts has been addressing these issues for years. Consequently, these systems can quickly scale and incorporate any of these new requirements or environments.  Through the new IBM cloud options and capabilities in your DB2 Family architectures you can incorporate these new practices and JSON data types to leverage by all types of new web elastic applications incorporating all types of internet of devices.
3. Analyze requirements to determine your proper cloud architecture.   Through these IBM cloud options and capabilities your DB2 Family architectures can incorporate, leverage, or extend many different cloud options.  The governance, privacy, and security requirements of the variety of data applications implementing the optimum architecture is critical to your company.  The choices of proprietary, hybrid, public, dedicated, or commodity cloud offer a variety of governance, risk and security models that the business must recognize or possibly suffer the potential disastrous consequences.  Start the discussions now to help the architecture teams evaluate the risks of the various cloud and DB2 options and how the new services will interface with your current applications and databases.  The core DB2 systems will be sharing their data with this new next cloud platform.  Analyze the new cloud application architectures carefully so that the correct risk/reward can be adopted into the best governance security design possible.

Management cloud initiatives are here, so communicate, evaluate, and analyze the application requirements with the architects in your company to ensure your DB2 and overall infrastructure performance.  Just like all the other previous client server, UNIX distributed, and big data trends, the cloud is the limitless capacity solution.  Help your management understand the cloud options and risks so that the solutions enhance your business today and tomorrow.

Dave Beulke is a system strategist, application architect, and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, and President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs.

DB2 Night Show June 13th

I will be presenting on June 13th via webcast in the DB2 Night Show presenting my “Big Data Disaster Recovery Performance” presentation.  Sign up at their website that can be found here (https://www3.gotomeeting.com/island/webinar/registration.tmpl;jsessionid=abcdmLLykGXL7cSWIwyzu?id=441719086)