Are you just starting your journey with Azure and cloud technology? We work with many clients in their journey and with helping them migrate data to the cloud. While working with clients we sometimes hear the following concerns from data professionals:
- As we move our data to the cloud, what’s my job going to look like?
- Will I eventually be out of a job?
- I’m currently managing all these on prem servers and if everything is in the cloud, am I still going to be needed?
Today I want to ease the minds of those with these questions and talk about how those jobs are not going away, they’re just going to change. Here’s a look:
- Many DBAs today would describe their job as making sure servers are up and running; part of that includes things like operating system patches and software upgrades. If you’re moving your data to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, a lot of that does go away, there’s not software upgrades, system patches or servers to manage. But there’s still work to do with backups. Yes, backups are managed automatically with PaaS but there is work with things such as extending how long those backups are maintained. The product out of the box maintains your backups for a certain amount of time, but if you have requirements that dictate that you need them longer, that’s going to take some work.
- Restoring your data doesn’t happen automatically. If someone makes a mistake on their data and needs to restore a database from yesterday, that work needs to be done by your data managers.
- Security is not going to change. Databases still need to be secured and someone must manage things like granting permissions to new users or restricting access to new objects. They way you go about managing it may be different, but the work is going to be there.
- The whole idea of disaster recovery changes a bit as we move to PaaS and some new offerings. You’ll have different options within Azure as far as redundancy and spreading your data across servers.
- In Azure, data managers can manage costs. It used to be that you bought your server and your licensing and that money was out the door. With Azure, data professionals and DBAs can manage costs by looking at how heavily our databases are being used and save money by scaling up or down a tier.
- With job monitoring, if you’re using SQL Server Agent and you’re running SSIS packages, that may look different but there’s still work in making sure that things are working properly as we expect. There are also new features that we can enable to help with monitoring and alerting.
So, if you hear some of these concerns from your data professionals or have them yourself, relax, you’ll still have your job and have plenty to do, it just might look a little different. But look at these changes as opportunities. If you have questions on this topic or about anything Azure related, click the link below or contact us—we’d love to help.