Enterprise IT is undergoing massive transformation led by technologies that enable the virtualization, dynamic deployment, and elastic scalability of resources. Coupled with professional management services in the cloud, these technologies offer more control and cost-effective management of IT systems than has ever been seen before. This is particularly important in the database sphere. Without cloud managed database services, databases are managed manually through fixed compute and storage resources acquired for fixed periods and maintained by the datacenter staff. 

For decades, that was the only way to manage databases. But in recent years, an alternative has arisen, which is to move the database workload to a managed database service in the public cloud. In this way, while teams of professionals in the service do the work of provisioning and patching, the enterprise database staff can work to ensure that the data needs of the business are being met and that the data team can excel in supporting the enterprise mission. This white paper examines the issues involved in manually managing a database in the datacenter contrasted with either deploying a manually managed database in the cloud or subscribing to a managed cloud database service. It considers the benefits of moving to a managed cloud database service and provides actionable advice regarding how to proceed.