An ever-growing database population is giving rise to challenges, with IT teams struggling to keep up with maintaining, backing up, patching, upgrading, monitoring and optimising hundreds of servers, databases and operating systems.

Overwhelming numbers of dedicated database systems create server and software sprawl, while incurring punitive deployment and operational costs. To make matters worse, provisioning is time-consuming and inecient, often taking weeks to get done.

Cloud computing is now widely seen as the optimum route for organisations seeking a proactive and predictive approach to database management.