The rigorous new demands of the digital economy are forcing enterprises to modernize outdated and increasingly brittle IT environments that were not originally intended to handle the always-on and data-fueled business demands of today.
While those modernization efforts eventually span all elements of the IT landscape, the area drawing the greatest amount of focus today for business leaders is getting their data capabilities up to speed. Regardless of what industry a company is in, or whether it has 500 or 150,000 employees, the success of every business over the next few years will hinge on its ability to become a data-driven enterprise that can gather, analyze, and act on data to:
- Gain deeper insights into its own products and services
- Identify new market opportunities ahead of competitors
- Engage more intimately and productively with customers
- Collaborate more effectively and rapidly with partners and suppliers
- Create new revenue flows from data-centric products and services
- Help rapidly evolving organizations dazzle customers and employees
But sitting in between that appealing aspiration and life-in-the-trenches reality lie some aging databases, servers, applications, middleware, and underlying architecture built for a business world in which stability and steadiness were the objectives, and frequent changes were the enemy.
So what’s the right path toward that data-centric future? Well, let’s look at a few options:
- Rip and Replace. Some companies have gone with the old “rip and replace” model, which plays out pretty much as it sounds: Existing stuff is torn out and new stuff is installed. Meanwhile, there are lots of high-anxiety moments for the company whose production systems are being blown up and rebuilt. More and more, this highly invasive R&R approach feels like a fossilized relic from another era which is incredibly expensive and requires a considerable amount of time, labor resources, and effort.
- Do Nothing! While option #1 might sound unappealing — and it usually is exactly that — this tried and true approach of whistling past the graveyard is even worse. With #1, there’s a chance of success; with the Do Nothing plan, total failure is guaranteed.
- Go with modern real-time expertise. An impressive array of modern technologies and solutions can help enterprises overcome the perils of outdated, overpriced, and underpowered technology and deliver robust data capabilities.
Redis Enterprise, the real-time data platform, specializes in helping global businesses of any size accelerate and simplify their data operations without having to undergo a high-risk rip-and-replace procedure. Let’s take a look at two of the most common ways businesses are deploying Redis Enterprise to accelerate their use of data while also lowering costs and simplifying the IT environment.
A. Helping to Optimize Your Oracle Investments
Redis Enterprise has been designed to work with and overcome the limitations of Oracle’s database technologies, which are already used by hundreds of thousands of businesses. This can help you preserve your Oracle investments while also gaining the ability to handle modern data-intensive use cases such as AI, session management, fraud detection, and real-time claims processing.
In addition to driving much greater levels of database speed and performance, Redis Enterprise also helps businesses overcome two other persistent problems with older Oracle technology: cost and inflexibility.
- Cost: Licenses for some Oracle Databases can cost tens of thousands of dollars. While those technologies might have been state-of-the-art when first introduced, they simply can’t deliver world-class value in today’s data-intensive business environment.
- Inflexibility: Because a lot of Oracle Databases support only relational data, they cannot be used with multiple data models—and today, with so much data coming in from so many places, businesses have to be able to handle multiple data models.
B. How Caching Can Help Optimize Your Modernization Efforts
Microservices applications have become a powerful tool for enterprises, offering such benefits as:
- Deploy code more rapidly: Small teams can be more adaptable and agile
- Optimize solutions: Developers can build with the best technology for the desired outcome
- Boost developer productivity: Simple and modular code can be reused for multiple purposes, which accelerates development cycles
- Isolate faults: Application components are individually operable and scalable so problems in one don’t impact other microservices
However, microservices architectures also have some challenges, including complexity, consistency, and latency.
But Redis Enterprise has been designed to overcome all of those challenges, and caching helps IT teams surmount the negative issues of microservices:
“[Caching] takes data that was stored in a database on your server’s hard disk and moves it to a temporary place where it can be accessed far more quickly and efficiently. As a result, the complex, energy, and time-consuming operation to acquire data only needs to be performed once….
“Of course, as your company gets bigger and its reach grows, the stakes get higher and your margin for error becomes razor thin. Suddenly, caching is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have. What’s convenient for a small-scale company becomes essential for a large-scale competitive enterprise. And failure is not an option.
“Enter the enterprise cache. Built on the solid foundation of the basic cache, it provides a suite of features that enterprises require in order to keep pace with growing demands, including high availability, genuine product support, sub-millisecond performance, fully distributed replication, and a cost-effective way of managing your complex data sets. It’s more scalable, more failure resistant, and yes, more affordable.”
Additional Redis Insights:
- Redis Briefing Center
- How Redis Helped Ulta Beauty Dazzle Customers During Lockdown
- How Data Modernization Creates the Real-Time Data Reality
