Cloud computing has become one of the essential daily drivers in technology. With the ongoing pandemic pushing companies to migrate to the cloud, adopting the cloud-powered everything-as-a-service (XaaS) is high.
Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) provides several data management services. I’ll teach you how it works, its benefits, and its use cases. Finally, I’ll show you a quick comparison between it and data center infrastructure management (DCIM).
What is Data Management as a Service (DMaaS)?
Data management is a crucial aspect of any business. It helps build and maintain a data framework to store, ingest, transform, mine, archive, secure, and transmit the data as needed.
Data Management as a Service offers all these aspects mentioned above while meeting several other requirements specific to your needs, such as big data management, advanced analytics, data security, and governance.
The “as-a-service” aspect of DMaas allows you to leverage a pay-per-usage business model that doesn’t involve any upfront infrastructure or setup costs.
Now that you understand what DMaaS is, let’s see how it works.
How DMaaS Works
Like any “as-a-service” platform, DMaaS is also a packaged cloud-based service capable of providing a custom-made data management service portfolio on-demand.
Moreover, service providers and DMaaS vendors maintain and provide all the necessary infrastructure, hardware, or software needed to provide end-to-end data management services.
DMaaS packs several integral aspects of effective enterprise data management, such as disaster recovery, data backup, file and object storage, data security, and analytics. It also provides a development environment for you to leverage data.
Since DMaaS works through a cloud delivery model, service providers essentially provide you with access to all the associated data management services through web browsers.
You can pay-per-use and customize your subscription based on your needs and requirements to meet your company’s needs. DMaaS uses traditional cloud services to scale as per your needs. It can work with public, private, or even hybrid cloud setups.
Let’s now go over some of its main benefits:
Benefits of DMaaS
Data is one of the most valuable resources in the contemporary IT world. To extract insights, you’ll need to safeguard and process them correctly. With the exponentially increasing amounts of data present, maintaining, storing, and transforming it adds significant overheads to your business.
DMaaS can help you overcome all these challenges while providing the flexibility of being cloud-based with flexible costs and easy setup. The right data management service can help you increase your business productivity, cost efficiency, and operational agility. It can also help you reduce security risks and data losses.
Being a cloud-based service, DMaaS can bundle all the advantages mentioned above of data management and provide these additional advantages:
- A well-configured DMaaS can protect your valuable organizational data from several forms of cyberattacks and intruders.
- It can help you boost your overall efficiency and generate better business. This is because of its inbuilt business intelligence, data processing, and dashboarding abilities.
- Being a cloud-based service, it can help reduce costs while adding additional value to your business. It completely mitigates the need for heavy upfront infrastructural and setup costs.
- It provides flexibility to update your services and meets your business’s needs.
- Due to its pay-per-use model, DMaaS can lead to predictable costs. This makes it easy to account for organizational expenditures.
- It requires very minimal technical expertise to get started. This is because the service vendors take ownership of the necessary implementation.
- It also serves as a centralized medium for better visibility across your organizational data. It also helps address siloed situations.
Now that I’ve discussed the benefits of DMaaS. Let’s look at some of its use cases:
Use Cases for DMaaS
DMaaS offers several use cases for businesses and organizations of all domains and sizes. Based on the above-discussed definition, the top 6 use cases for DMaaS are:
- You can configure it to be an effective data backup and a disaster recovery tool/service for your organization.
- It can easily get deployed on both on-premise and cloud environments for end-to-end data management services.
- It can help eliminate data silos.
- If your organization has large data sets, you can leverage them to serve as an archiving solution.
- DMaaS solutions can offer you intuitive dashboards for easy access, viewing, and control over your organizational data.
- Being a cloud-based solution, you enjoy advanced software services and features through DMaaS.
Finally, I’ll touch on data center infrastructure management (DCIM) briefly. Then I’ll highlight a few main differences between DMaaS and DCIM. Let’s dive in.
DMaaS vs DCIM
While DMaaS is cloud-based, data center infrastructure management, or DCIM, is a paradigm that serves as a convergence of the IT and infrastructure facilities within your organization. DCIM allows data center operators and IT administrators to manage operations easily.
Here are some of the essential differences between the two:
| DMaaS | DCIM |
| It is a cloud-only (SaaS) platform | Available in the cloud as well as on-premise options |
| DMaaS works on a much broader enterprise-level scale and provides a holistic picture of your organization’s data | DCIM helps in optimizing operations by leveraging specific facilities within your organization |
| DMaaScan be easily deployed and used without necessarily having technical skills | A traditional DCIM service needs IT expertise and engineers on-ground to manage the data centers |
| DMaaS is a cheap and fully customizable solution with a pay-per-use structure | DCIM’s price depends on your data center’s requirements. It usually is high |
| DMaaS amalgamates all the available IT resources within your organization. It also extends its services by gathering insights throughout your organization across all the environments | Traditionally, a DCIM evaluates and measures specific data center environments |
Final Words
In this article, I’ve explained how cloud computing is reshaping the enterprise IT landscape through several flexible “as-a-service” models”. I’ve also explained what Data Management as a Service means, its several benefits, and its use cases. I’ve also covered a brief comparison and contrast between DMaaS and DCIM.
Like with every cloud service, you need to be careful in choosing your DMaaS service provider. Do your research beforehand to explore and find out what your organization wants in a DMaaS solution.
Explore all the possible options and consider the crucial aspects. These include ease of usage, costs, flexibility in changing or adjusting the service plan, and dependencies.
Do you have more questions about Data Management as a Service? Check out the FAQ and Resources sections below to know more!
FAQ
What is data management in the IT world?
Data management is the practice of collection, organization, storing, protecting, and transforming organizational data as needed. Data management aims to provide valuable data-driven insights to businesses while optimizing their operations.
What is an archiving solution?
An archiving solution serves as an indexed repository of electronic data. They make it easy for any organization to capture, store, index, and search the data effectively. In terms of flexibility, they can address both structured and unstructured data. Data archiving is an essential module of any DMaaS solution.
What are the benefits of DCIM?
Data Center Infrastructure System provides access to accurate and accessible information on a data center; it can serve as a source of truth for asset management and helps organizations in reducing operational costs. Although it is closely associated with DMaaS, it is a subset of what DMaaS can offer to organizations.
Who are some of the DMaaS service providers?
DMaaS is a relatively new cloud offering and is still burgeoning in the contemporary IT world. While major cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle offer data management services, specialized vendors like Cohesity already offer DMaaS to the public.
What are data silos?
A data silo, or information silo, is a disconnected group or entity of data within an organization that is usually only accessible by one division. Data silos don’t contribute to holistic data monitoring or evaluation. They are one of the major hindrances in extracting data-driven insights or making business decisions. DMaaS can help address data silos.
Resources
TechGenix: Newsletters
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TechGenix: News
Explore the latest news in the IT enterprise world here.
TechGenix: Article on Enterprise Software
Learn about different enterprise software and the latest news and implementational details here.
TechGenix: Article on Data Management Challenges and Opportunities
Click here to learn more about the key data management challenges and opportunities for SMBs.
Intel: Is Data Management as a Service the Future?
Click here to read more about Intel’s opinion on DMaaS and several benefits it can provide to enterprises worldwide.
