From e-commerce to entertainment, Asia Pacific's consumers are growing in numbers and sophistication, demanding only the best service from brands. In a remarkably short span of time, they have increased their purchasing power significantly — a testament to the economic miracles Asia Pacific has witnessed over recent decades.
Today, the wealth of options available to the average consumer in the region has grown immensely, not least through improved access to the Internet. As more consumers go online, enterprises are vying for supremacy in the face of new and exciting business opportunities.
This leap in access to online marketplaces has also coincided with the new ground being broken by big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT) and 5G. Naturally, the region's businesses have turned to the cloud for the impetus to leverage these advancements. Cloud innovations have proven useful for raising flexibility and functionality, as well as enabling organisations to focus on speed and performance via simplified operations.
Likewise, businesses in the region need the same scalability the cloud affords when it comes to their databases. With the monumental growth of data and metadata piling up, scaling databases is imperative to delighting customers and gaining a competitive edge. This is beyond the scope of SQL and legacy monolithic databases, which still serve a purpose but are not enough to accommodate this data deluge.
Traditional data infrastructures capture and store data at rest, which is the operational data that you process on a daily basis. But, this is not good enough. To stay competitive in the market, enterprises must turn to an ecosystem of technologies available across multiple clouds that can not only host operational data but also transmit the changes to this data in real-time to end users.
One solution for enterprise leaders is a multi-cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) built upon linearly scalable NoSQL databases. A DBaaS is a hosted cloud computing service with integrated open-source tools that capture not only data at rest but also data in motion.
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From Netflix movie recommendations to ordering a Starbucks drink on your phone, data in motion drives real-time applications that address growing customer needs fast and seamlessly. For businesses, a distributed database delivers the high availability necessary for peak performance.
Today, 93% of Asia Pacific’s most successful companies use – or plan to use in the foreseeable future –multi-cloud environments to scale up and down flexibly with no cloud-vendor lock-in. With a multi-cloud DBaaS, you will be able to distribute your data across multiple data centres, geographical regions, and cloud environments.
Even when one data centre is down, you can still piggyback off of another. This means 100% uptime for your high-growth apps and infinite scalability for your datastore so you can stay competitive and innovative in the market.
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With a DBaaS, enterprise leaders do not have to worry about provisioning hardware, installing and updating software, or configuring databases: your provider will handle everything for you with globally available support.
To keep up with exploding consumer and data demands, enterprises must integrate a multi-cloud, multi-location DBaaS that can scale infinitely, provide real-time insights, and accelerate time to market while lowering the total cost of operations. This is the secret sauce for successful data-driven businesses that can grow alongside Asia’s advanced consumers and lead the next digital decade.
Deb Dutta is the general manager for Asia Pacific & Japan at DataStax
