AI-empowered databases

Artificial intelligence databases, similar to other areas under the IT industry, have a large impact on the management of databases. Oracle and Microsoft use AI for monitoring their workload patterns on their databases. They also depend upon AI for continuous automatic tuning of their systems.

Businesses should understand the significance of artificial intelligence now. It is a unique opportunity for them to embrace their database management solutions for proactively supporting capacity planning, performance tuning, support security, and workload optimization.

AI database – what does it mean?

AI is intrinsic by nature, and this is why it is challenging to standardize the terminology. However, specific terms like deep learning, machine learning, and AI are commonly understood and referred to as the same terms.

An AI database uses a system with the complete text, and when someone uses it, the response sent back will match the data as much as possible. This is where it differs from a conventional database system that depends upon verbatim sentences, and other keyword phrases joined with one another with Boolean functions.

How does it function?

When one searches with the traditional database that uses a full-text, having the phrases and the keywords in any reference file will not mean that all the contents inside this file are relevant in the specific context. The AI system gives the use of better flexibility to choose their options for carrying out questions. SO that means you have many options to customize it. Ensure that you have your business considerations in mind to get the best results.

For instance, when one types in a question using a complete sentence, the AI database will respond with a list of hits as possible data with the answer. The system also can rectify mistakes, and it can even display relevant synonyms and antonyms as well for the words that have been used.

To derive the maximum benefits from an AI database, the user should make questions with foresight by phrasing them with care. If the query fails to fetch the relevant results, the user can proceed to ask another more precise question or even change its entire nature.

In order to get optimal value from the AI database system, one should think about the queries with the foresight of placing them in the field with care. If the question does not fetch relevant responses, one can become more precise with words or even change the whole phrase to get the desired response the next time.

The query search can be restricted to a specific server, network or computer, or the whole web. It can be limited to relevant topics or fields like white papers, regional or world news, products, images, or even the domain of information technology.

The AI database offers the user a history of their searches. If it is needed to refine the specific search later on or execute another search on a similar topic, the user no longer has to start from the beginning again.

Pros of using AI for modern businesses

Experts from esteemed database management, consulting, and administration company RemoteDBA lays down the following benefits of using AI in businesses today-

Reduces human errors –

People make mistakes now and then. Computers, on the other hand, do not make these mistakes if they have been programmed correctly. Here algorithms are used for reducing mistakes and improving the accuracy of the question.

Example- AI is widely used in forecasting weather today, and it has reduced human errors in the field to a large extent.

Takes more risks than humans –

It helps humans to overcome several risky restrictions of humans by creating empowered robots which can even do dangerous things for people. They can explore the deep depths of an ocean, fly off to Mars, defuse bombs, mine for oil and coal, and do lots more, even in any artificial or natural disaster.

Example- Take, for instance, the explosion at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in Ukraine. During that period, there were no AI robots to assist humans in reducing radiation by controlling fire in its initial stage as people who went near the core died in just some minutes. People have to pour boron and sand from helicopters from a distance finally. AI robots can be used in such situations where human intervention can be dangerous.

Helps with repetitive tasks –

In our daily work, we perform several repetitive tasks like sending out emails, verifying documents for human errors, and other things. With the use of artificial intelligence, all of these tasks can be automated. Humans often find certain tasks to be boring and mundane. AI can take the onus of these tasks and free up human resources for creative and interesting work.

Example – In banks, you often see that the verification of loan application documents becomes a boring and repetitive task for the owner. With the help of AI Cognitive Automation, owners can accelerate the processes of document verification by which the customer and the bank owner both are benefitted.

The above are just three benefits of artificial intelligence. They have many more as well. You often see them as digital assistants for companies working as chatbots or voice bots with customers. when it comes to using its technologies for their work. The power of AI is also used in Google’s OK Google, Window’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri. Therefore, when it comes to its uses and advantages, it is immense and highly valuable in the world today, not only for database management but for other salient day-to-day tasks as well.

The post Artificial Intelligence and Database Management – A Symbiotic Relationship appeared first on Tech Web Space.

From the above, it is now needless to emphasize the fact that related industries had to accelerate their efforts for digitalization to stay afloat in the Pandemic. There was and still, to some extent, a large element of uncertainty. This digital shift sans the adoption of the cloud has not been optimized fully, which is why many businesses are shifting to the cloud to stay afloat.

An overview

Cloud computing refers to the on-demand access to computing resources which companies need to run their business operations via the Internet. These can be in the form of software applications, remote database networks servers, storage facilities, developmental tools, and network infrastructure. Generally, reliable corporate service providers offer the resources to the enterprises they host and manage via virtual data centres. In return for their service, the vendors charge corporations a monthly subscription fee according to their usage. In case your business has still not made the shift, here are five reasons to consider cloud migration:

Migration to the cloud offers-

Cost savings

Companies generally find setting up and operating an on-premise data centre for their businesses to be an expensive venture. The executives of these enterprises first need to select and buy the right equipment. They even have to hire the experienced third-party technicians to install the storage systems, routers, servers, firewalls, and business-critical applications. Only then can the corporations’ software specialists get the centres up and running.

When the same companies opt to use cloud computing to conduct their operations, they only pay for the services they avail. The vendors offering this facility to their clients devise their ‘’pay-as-you-use” subscription-based pricing policies on many factors. These include technological features, storage capacity, number of end-users logging into the system, bandwidth, and memory space. This enables the corporations to use a package that meets their budgetary requirements. In the process, they can cut down on their operating costs.

Flexibility

Cloud computing allows the companies’ directors, executives, and employees to access the Internet-based IT resources from any location. This allows them to complete important tasks from their homes, offices, or any other remote location. Moreover, the enterprises can request their service providers to adjust the bandwidth according to the scale of their business operations. This is not possible with on-premises data centre infrastructure.

Experts from credible database administration and management company, RemoteDBA.com, emphasize by saying resorting to cloud computing allows companies to cut down on the hardware they install in their own IT infrastructure. There is no need for the enterprises to go on setting up extra workstations, network devices, and storage systems servers. This enables the corporations to significantly reduce their capital expenditure which results in further cost savings. Moreover, cloud computing enables companies to monitor their IT and business operations even remotely efficiently.

Scalability

Companies that continue to use an on-premise data centre face immense challenges in ensuring their IT infrastructure matches their growth needs. The enterprises often need to purchase additional servers, workstations, and storage systems under a license whenever their business activities expand. Installing and getting the resources operational often takes many years. In the meantime, the corporations experience regular disruptions to the activities because of the increase in downtime. This costs the companies both time and money.

On the other hand, cloud computing enables companies to resolve many of the scalability issues they face using on-premises data centres. The enterprises can invest in additional virtual workstations, servers, and storage facilities from a vendor to keep pace with expanding operations. The service provider then upgrades the corporations’ package and changes higher subscription fees. The revenue which the increase in business operations generates is enough to cover additional costs and still earn a profit.

No need for disaster recovery and backup plans

Companies using conventional on-premises physical servers and data servers need to have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategy. The plan envisages making multiple copies of critical business data and storing the information in secure locations. This ensures the corporations can get the IT resources up and running again in the aftermath of unforeseen calamities. These include natural disasters, man-made cyber-attacks, accidental database corruption, or unintentional data deletion.

In the case of cloud computing, the vendor which the companies hire is responsible for devising backup and disaster recovery plans. This corporate service provider ensures all its clients get unlimited access to their critical business data under all circumstances. The service provider will set up the relevant remote yet secure data centres and storage facilities to achieve this objective. As long as the corporations have seamless Internet connectivity, they can easily access and use their business data.

Data security

Data security is always a serious issue for all companies. The corporations maintaining on-premises data centres take extensive security measures to secure their facilities from potential cyber threats. These include installing various closed-circuit cameras, real-time sensors, and firewalls to prevent cyber-criminals from infiltrating their facilities. The enterprises even encrypt the data on their database servers with strong passwords and issue accessibility privileges to specific employees. However, cyber-criminals can still bypass these security measures can disrupt the companies’ operations.

As in the case of disaster recovery and backup, the cloud computing service provider takes on the responsibility of data security. This vendor ensures all remote data centres, storage facilities, and workstations have adequate security measures to avert all forms of cyber-attacks. This makes it extremely difficult for cyber-criminals like hackers to breach and compromise the companies’ business data.  The service provider even allows an enterprise to secretly transfer their data to different secure locations if they feel it is under threat.

No matter how big and small your business is, surviving the Pandemic is the need of the hour. Cloud migration is an affordable and powerful strategy to help you stay afloat and tackle these times of uncertainty with success.

The post 5 Reasons Why Businesses Should Move To Cloud Computing In 2021 appeared first on Tech Web Space.

In this article, we discuss how database storage administrators and cloud data administrators look for a solid database protection practice to have the databases on the cloud. We will explore some of the industry best practices too for cloud database protection.

Keeping the data in multiple zones

When you are putting your data on the cloud, you may need some kind of a solution based upon which the providers you choose may protect your database. There are different efficient storage systems, which can cost-effectively provide enterprise-grade storage. Some such solutions are Amazon Elastic Block Storage or Amazon EBS and Azure Disk Storage extra.

To ensure optimum reliability and high availability, solutions like Amazon replicate and save up to three distinct copies of the data in an availability zone for protecting against any possible data loss during a server failure. Even though Amazon Web Services and Azure promise SLK software with 99.99% efficiency in terms of availability, the risk is that your data is stored in only a single region or availability zone. If there is a complete crash down of the zone, it will end up in a total-loss disaster.

To ensure optimum database protection, it is a safe idea to have the data across multiple availability zones to be protected even if there is a complete zonal failure. When you set up Amazon RDS or Azure database, it is configured in a multi-zone setup. While you are setting up the database environment, keep disaster recovery (DR) and high availability as a top consideration, ensure that the standby databases are replicated in multiple zones for availability. With this approach, if in case the primary instance fails due to a complete disaster at the given zone, the application can still switch to the standby setup from another availability zone.

You may use technologies like Amazon S3 for replicating the backups of cloud databases across different regions for increased reliability and durability; it will also help reduce the cost of keeping your backups for a longer period. However, to protect your operations by using multiple availability zones, you have many technological tools like NetApp cloud volume ONTAP cloud, etc. You can avail of the services of providers like RemoteDBA.com for multi-zone remote database management.

Access control for cloud databases

As in the case of on-premises enterprise databases, one important concern to protect a database on the cloud is keeping the data secured from any unwanted access. Access control is also important to ensure that you avoid any chances of data breaches and ensure optimum compliance. Azure and AWS security controls may allow you to set up a secured environment for the databases in order to avoid any breaches. Some important considerations for data access control are as below.

• Virtual private cloud (VPC) will give you the ability to run the database instances in a logically isolated manner on the private cloud environments. It will also provide complete control over the networking environment, and VPC can also allow you to set up the subunits and IP addresses for the network gateways.

• You can also set up security groups for the public-facing applications which are openly available on the internet. These can be protected by another group of security administration tools and the backend application servers on a public or private cloud.

• With a virtual private cloud, you can maintain a hybrid cloud database setup like the databases on-cloud and on the premises can reside together on the virtual private environment. This will allow data centers to access the cloud data directly as well as privately.

Ensuring safer data transits

In the case of enterprise cloud databases, you may move huge volumes of data from the on-premises storage to the cloud or other storage systems. These types of data movements may require the IT teams and the storage professionals to find more secured solutions to migrate and do handsome data synchronization between different environments.

Your data may be vulnerable to outages, attacks, and failures of various types during this transaction process. These may also further result in a partial or complete crash of databases. Data transit may also raise some risks to compliance. You have to encrypt all the data at rest, including huge data volume snapshots, backups, boot disks, data archives, etc. The technological solutions to do this are Azure Blob and Amazon S3 extra. You can also configure Amazon Cloudtail as your activity logs to audit all the storage and record any events to configure an AWS Key Management Service or Azure Key Vault.

You can also recover from all the failures and data outages that occur during the transit of data and keep track of synchronization schedules for your data. In addition to availing of the provider services, you can also use NetApp tools to help address these types of changes. Data encryption can also be addressed using NetApp encryption, which offers a single control panel for all cloud resources.

Access control for cloud

In the case of compound computing, you also need to set up role-based permissions to access the cloud resources, including databases. In order to enhance cloud security, you should also leverage some identity and access management service provided by AWS or Azure. Using the security features like policy definition, users, roles and responsibilities, and Groups, etc., you can effectively protect your data from any user actions or loss.

As the best practice in cloud access security, you can create some security groups with related permissions based on the security policies. For example, you may create a group that got permission for DB admins only and assign that group to only database admin. Similarly, you can also have the policies implemented like that they can’t drop the database.

Above all these, also make sure that all your data storage and databases on the cloud are coming under the scope of access management and identity control for optimal protection. You have to keep complete control over who accesses your database and what type of changes or data manipulation they do.

The post Protecting a Database on Cloud – Some Key Practices to Follow appeared first on Tech Web Space.