Question

Describe in 500 words what a dba must be aware of to maintain good regulatory compliance when moving to the cloud.

Answer 1

The Changing Role of the DBA

The Traditional DBA

A database administrator is the professional that takes charge of tasks directly and indirectly related to the lifecycle of databases in an organization. Although the role varies across different companies, some tasks are central to the DBA role.

At a very high level, these include:

Designing, installing and configuring databases.

General maintenance: hardware, upgrades, backups, troubleshooting, recovery.

Migration, security, performance tuning and monitoring of databases.

Developer assistance.

Each of these tasks is both broad and deep, which is why, in most scenarios, a single DBA will not perform all of them. Depending on the size of the organization and/or the volume of data, a DBA might specialize in one or two areas.

Cloud Services Have Changed the DBA Role

The cloud (i.e., access to shared computing power through the Internet, typically in the form of services by a third-party vendor) has completely changed the nature of most technology-powered businesses. The shift has brought countless benefits to the way organizations build and deploy software, but it has also required a restructuring of the work of most engineers, including DBAs.

Concerns like scalability, fault tolerance, security in the cloud and replication are just a few of the many aspects that need to be considered when handling data in the cloud. As a result, the traditional role of the DBA has shifted into the still somewhat amorphous domain of Data Engineering, with the DBA becoming central to many businesses and other other parts of the organization. In this evolved role, the DBA moves in the realm of Big Data, databases replicated across hundreds of servers, queries that are required to run in under a second while searching across terabytes of information, and other challenges that were impossible to solve 20 years ago.

Emerging DBA Activities

With the modern DBA role no longer constrained to the boundaries of pure database administration, DBAs in technology companies are now thought of as Data Professionals whose activities touch all aspects of data management. And we’re talking about unfathomable amounts of data. The very core of today’s technology is to help organizations harness increasingly large volumes of information to produce business value. Therefore, the Data Professional’s main activities are geared towards making sure that data is readily available and can be used to make both human and automated decisions. Some of the skills necessary for being a successful Data Professional include:

Cost, Vendor and Budget Management

Most cloud services are provided by a third-party vendor. It is important, therefore, that the Cloud DBA / Data Professional has an expert understanding of the services consumed by the organization. This skillset includes being very knowledgeable about the costs incurred when maintaining the data infrastructure, as well as architecting systems in a way that is in line with the company’s requirements and budget. It is also of paramount importance to keep current with new capabilities of and improvements in the services provided by the third-party vendor, since these changes will most likely have some impact on the organization’s infrastructure.

Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery

Information in the cloud is stored in some vendor’s infrastructure, which generates several challenges when it comes to an organization’s sensitive and critical data. The Data Professional needs to be able to plan for and execute on scenarios so that failure at any point along the data pipeline does not affect the flow of information required by the company to function. This responsibility requires a deep and nuanced understanding of the value of the company’s data and taking the appropriate measures to keep this value intact when data-related technology fails—as it invariably will.

Performance

Every organization today is expected to deliver its value in a fast and reliable way. From the technology perspective, this expectation translates into answering questions as fast as possible, even when sorting through vast volumes of data. The Data Professional is expected to build and maintain highly distributed data pipelines that are high-performance, in a context where the definition of high-performance might change overnight (because, for example, a competitor was able to perform the same operation faster). The Data Professional needs to be skilled in monitoring the performance of the infrastructure and constantly finding ways to make it faster.

Security

Although most public cloud vendors provide security mechanisms and reasonably secure services, data security is still a top concern. Protecting sensitive information across highly-distributed infrastructures can be a challenge, and the Data Professional needs to explore possible internal and external threat sources and comply with corporate security guidelines. Over the last decade we have witnessed countless breaches in security, including attacks on well-established and mature organizations. The very nature of the cloud and of services delivered through the Internet makes it vital for organizations to protect their data, and the Data Professional must be very involved in the process.