CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 27, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

As enterprises make the sweeping move from traditional data centers to cloud computing, a survey by 451 Research shows that some 90 percent of information technology (IT) database managers and executives say their selection of database technologies relates to the suppliers’ cloud strategy.

The report states that while the initial adoption of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings from cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), have posed a challenge to the incumbent on-premises database vendors, the survey results indicate that those incumbent vendors are likely to maintain their dominance as adoption of DBaaS moves mainstream.

The just released survey, sponsored by Tesora, included more than 200 database managers and IT executives in North America who are large users of databases with nearly 90 percent of respondents having more than 25 databases in production at their enterprise.

Matt Aslett, research director for data platforms and analytics at 451 Research, explains that the database incumbents – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, as well as Teradata in analytic workloads – that have dominated the database landscape for decades, have the advantages of established trusted supplier relationships, along with installed workloads and expertise demonstrated over time.

Survey respondents indicated their top criteria for selecting a DBaaS as the ability to integrate with existing production applications (44 percent) followed by support for specific database management systems (38 percent).

"The survey results indicate that despite the strength of public cloud database offerings like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), incumbent database providers remain in a good position to defend their respective installed bases and extend them with database as a service offerings,” said Aslett.

“The results of the survey further confirm what we hear from customers: that databases are moving to the cloud, while at the same time enterprises need to continue using their existing databases,” said Ken Rugg, CEO of Tesora. “This is why so many enterprises find OpenStack’s Trove DBaaS so compelling. It provides the ultimate flexibility to pick and choose from the most popular databases allowing them to support their existing applications uninterrupted, while gaining all the benefits of the cloud.”

Survey Highlights

• Already, 68 percent of enterprises indicate they are using database technology in the cloud – whether a public cloud platform, private enterprise cloud or some hybrid mix of those.

• What applications are on DBaaS now? When looking at the workloads running on databases, the survey results indicate that DBaaS is already being used in a variety of ways, but mostly for line-of-business applications (57 percent), followed by Web applications (53 percent), and online analytical processing (OLAP) applications (51 percent).

• Why are enterprises adopting database in the cloud? The overall movement to cloud computing was the primary driving force. The development and deployment of a fully-cloud-based application suites scored highest with 57 percent, and then a company policy or mandate to leverage cloud services was cited by 52 percent. Also, some motivation was related specifically to database technology with ongoing maintenance and support costs for installed databases called out by 53 percent of respondents.

• Barriers: Security is the perennial concern in terms of potential barriers to cloud and DBaaS adoption, and this survey proved no exception. In terms of the factors that could limit take-up of DBaaS, security concerns ranked highest by far with 60 percent. Other barriers included migration/integration processes (39 percent), interoperability concerns (36 percent) and lack of clarity on cost (32 percent).

• Multiple suppliers for different usages: 451 notes that even single DBaaS deployments can involve multiple vendors. For example, the report cites the example of Tesora Database as a Service Platform (based on OpenStack Trove), which provides support for multiple databases such as MySQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, Datastax, MongoDB, Percona, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, Redis and Oracle Database.

Tesora is making available free copies of the full research report, which can be obtained at www.tesora.com/dbaas2015.

About Tesora

Tesora brings more than 200 years of cumulative database technology experience to the OpenStack community, helping organizations get the most from their OpenStack investment by making it easy to deliver database capacity on demand. The company is the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove project and developer of Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition, the first commercially-available product based on Trove. To learn more about Tesora visit www.tesora.com.