The Real Magic of Virtual Databases (VDB)

Business Applications are the new nerve system of almost every modern business. Sometimes
they are also the blood, heart, muscles and even the brain. So having the business applications
efficient and up to date, is essential for the business health and growth. Organizations invest a
significant part of their budget to develop, maintain and run those applications. Having better
applications, on-time, may provide a significant business edge over the competition, while
being late might end up with loss of income and customers.
So, what’s the big deal here? Just put enough resources in the right place and you are good to
go. As usual, life is a bit more complicated.

The Real Life Meanings Many of the off-the-shelf and tailor-made applications are connected
to databases. Those databases keep the organization business data, whether it contains online
transactions for ongoing operation or data-warehouses (DWH) for business analytics. That
means that during the end-to-end development process the users in the various stages (i.e. –
developers, QA team and so on) need to access copies of the production data in order to do
their job. These Data Copies need to be prepared, provisioned, controlled, and refreshed on a
regular basis. They also should be deleted when they are no longer needed. In a modern world
of exponential growth of business data size, it is not so easy to do.

The Traditional Way of managing data copies for Dev/Test and BI usually includes:

• Request from the user for a new or a fresh copy
• Allocating storage according to the data size and number of required copies.
• Cloning the production data (backup recovery for example) as needed
• For users allowed to sensitive data – customize individual copies for each user (usually DBA effort)
• For other users – create masked, anonymized copies to remove sensitive data.
• Allocate the copies to the users
• Track usage and make sure copies are deleted when no longer needed
• And of course – frequently ask for more storage and more time to manage the copies
  

The High Cost of the above process has many faces, and it is getting higher pretty fast:

• Infrastructure, mainly – but not only – storage
•  Time – Infra team, DBAs and most of all – developers and QA teams depending on others
• Quality – In order to reduce overhead, “shortcuts” become popular – using data subsets, long cycles between data refresh and more
• Mobility – very complicated to have your application developed in the cloud while your production is running in the data center or in other cloud.
• Security – risk of sensitive data leaks to unauthorized users. Who asked for GDPR fines?
• Time To Market will be the new business enemy
  

What if we could quickly provision thin virtual copies of the production data?
What if we manage the process from a single pane of glass?
What if we could provide masked and unmasked copies on-demand?
What if we could automate the all thing and even enable self-service provisioning?

The Good News is that we can.
(Sorry, no bad news for today)

(Trumpets)
Virtual Database Copy Management will help your business to:

• Reduce up to 90% of the storage required for Dev/Test/BI copies
  
• Cut 50-70% of the time it takes to create or refresh those copies
  
• Improve applications quality by provisioning copies of full logical size and helped developers to create bookmarks, roll back and fork
  
• Have your virtual copies provisioned anywhere, anytime.
  
• Reduce Time to Market by nearly a half.
  

How do we make it happen?
The virtual database (VDB) provisioning solution is based on a very simple policy-based
workflow:

1. Create a gold copy of the production database, and frequently update it with changes.
2. Keep desired point-in-time images (snapshots) of the gold copy
3. Add in-place or on-the-fly data masking
4. Provision multiple thin copies of those snapshots in read/write mode to the end users
   according to their access credentials
5.  Refresh those copies on demand within minutes
6.  Provide self-service access to the users and let them run free!

How do you make it happen?
Just call Datagon Systems and we will help you to define the needs and design the best VDB
solution for your business

Epilog: How do we get this done?

Datagon Systems provides end-to-end consultancy, design, and deployment services based on the Actifio platform and combined with the most suitable third-party products. For the resilience of your data.