How DBAs Will Support the Digital Workplace

What is the Digital Workplace?

The digital workplace is your opportunity to avoid doing useless things, based on a famous quote by Peter Drucker in the 80s. He said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Achieving a digital workplace will involve creating systems that support integrated workflows across your organization. Your digital workplace will need to span research and development, marketing and sales, customer support, HR, manufacturing, and IT. The challenge is to eliminate data silos and create systems that allow workers to quickly access the information they need to complete mission-critical tasks.

The transition is worth it. You’ll see many things that the digital workplace can do to help your business grow, including:

• More collaboration
• Higher employee engagement
• Increased productivity
• More effective recruiting
• Improved agility
• Enhanced customer experience

Many of the apps you’ll need for digital transformation will reside in the cloud. And, you’ll need the expertise in-house, through a managed services provider, or using a combination of the two to make sure your data is safe and doing its job.

How DBAs Will Help

In the past, a database administrator was responsible for managing assets. As the world and the cloud environment have evolved, today’s DBA can play a much more significant role in helping your business make sense of its data and develop the apps you’ll need to utilize it.

Your DBAs will use their knowledge of the data currently available in the organization. They know what it is, where it resides, and how it is connecting across the organization. As a result, DBAs will be able to act as strategists throughout your transformation. The volume of data that you need to manage is exploding. And, relational databases are no longer going to be the answer to managing it.

Experts estimate that in the next five years, 80% of the data worldwide will be unstructured. And the number of data sources used is increasing due to remote workforces and IoT. Your DBAs will need to change your configurations to integrate the new data types and sources. With all that new data, you may need to redesign schemas, data management, and SQL deployments.

DBAs will need to convert data into information and then create applications that let you gain the benefits of advanced analytics. As your platform’s capabilities increase, you’ll need augmented analytics that use machine learning and AI techniques. You’ll have information, not just data, and your DBA will help design platforms that will let you use the information in ways that weren’t possible in the past.

DBAs as Strategists

It’s true that cloud automation is the wave of the future. Some people believe that it will make DBAs obsolete. But, with all the knowledge they have of the data in your operations, it’s much more likely that DBAs will turn into strategists. They are the ones who can answer questions about how to integrate data flows and determine when you need an upgrade and how to minimize the impact of completing it.

You’ll also need a strategy for managing the cybersecurity risks that will only increase as cloud automation expands. Security risks will also increase as a larger number of diverse devices need access to your systems.

DBAs will leave the lower-level tasks of data management to the cloud providers. They will use their database knowledge, and expand on it, to develop the perspective you’ll need to make sure your data supports your digital transformation goals. A DBA is the best and sometimes the only person who can do that. The changes in the business environment don’t support the idea that the role of the DBA is going to diminish.

Datavail is leading the industry in helping customers to meet the database challenges they’re facing today, and will face in the future. We can help develop plans to let you take advantage of cloud automation, and provide ongoing services. Download our white paper entitled, “Cloud DBAs & the Future of Computing” to learn more.