75% of all databases will live in the cloud by 2022

Cloud infrastructure and services are fast becoming the default choice for data management, Gartner says

Companies are increasingly turning to the cloud to host their databases, according to a new report from Gartner.

The analyst house said that by 2022 the overwhelming majority of databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform. Just 25 percent will remain on-premises and only 5 percent will be considered for repatriation in-house.

Gartner attributed the trend to the increased use of databases for analytics and the growing appeal of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model

“According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,” said Donald Feinberg, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

“We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases — such as data warehousing, data lakes and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model.”

Gartner added that the database management system market grew by 18.4 percent to $46bn (£36.4bn) in 2018, with Azure and AWS responsible for over three-quarters of the growth.

Costs and benefits

Powerful analytics is becoming a key differentiator as organisations wrestle with a growing stockpile of data from which to derive insights.

Cloud-based data management systems offer speed, reliability and scalability, and integrate with third-party services that augment analytics capabilities. But, if organisations are not careful, the SaaS model quickly can cause monthly costs to spiral out of control.

Experts warn the desire to use cloud services to innovate should always be tempered by security considerations, especially as high-profile data breaches become more frequent. For industries such as healthcare and banking, for instance, the need for watertight data security can make hosting databases on the cloud untenable.