Why does IT need DMaaS and what is it?

Data Centers are centralized physical facilities used by enterprises to house their critical applications and data. Though data centers help us meet the real-time data transmission requirements, they have downtime issues and are often an expensive affair for most of the companies. Meanwhile, Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) was formed to monitor and give insights about the utilization and energy consumption of both IT and building components, from servers and storage to power distribution units and cooling gear.

However, as data centers grow more complex, the demand for more features in DCIM solutions increases too. As a result, DCIM has to move to cloud for additionally capabilities. Therefore, to enhance the manner data centers are managed and operated, we have DMaaS.

Data Management-as-a-Service (DMaaS) is a type of cloud service that provides enterprises with centralized storage for disparate data sources. It enables optimization of the IT layer by simplifying, monitoring, and servicing data center physical infrastructure from the edge to the enterprise. It is important to note that DMaaS is not DCIM nor is it SaaS-delivered version of DCIM.

According to Rhonda Ascierto, VP Research at Uptime Institute and former research director for the datacenter technologies and eco-efficient IT channel at 451 Research, DMaaS aggregates and analyzes large sets of anonymized customer data and can be enhanced with machine learning. She points out that a company using DCIM will never be able to receive insights from data that can match "what it can get with the DMaaS approach."

Moreover, as per a report commissioned by Intel, it can also produce cost savings, reduce data center downtime, and improve performance. The report also mentions that being easy to use and low-cost cloud solution, DMaaS provides IT professionals the ability to monitor their data center infrastructure incrementally, receive real-time insights, and prevent potential failures.

The authors of this report had surveyed around 200 IT directors, managers, system administrators, and application architects in the U.S. and the U.K. this summer. They found that about 45% of respondents cited cost savings as the most important feature in a data center management solution. Since DMaaS is effective alternative to DCIM tools, companies only need to ask their users to register for an account, while informing vendors about the specific needs of the organization and no of users registered and amount of storage each user will need. The vendor then automatically provisions and manages the infrastructure required to provide those services.

Thus, by lowering cost barriers associated with adoption, DMaaS brings the possibility for intuitive, real-time data center insights to the whole industry while making data management costs much more predictable. It will also offer protection to a company's data assets while drawing additional value from it. For data center, DMaaS enables maximized security of critical hardware through smart alarming and remote troubleshooting.

Unlike DCIM which is confined to a single data center, DMaas can help analyze a much larger pool, hence providing a more comprehensive view. Additionally, apart from providing analytical insights, DMaaS continuously learns and improves based on data collected across all users and loops of successes and failures of the industry. This allows it to promote data standardization across the IT environment while improving accessibility via cloud offerings. The latter means, data managers no longer need to be on-site nor rely on VPN to assess a risk or bring the right people resources to bear on a problem or concern.

Though DMaaS is in its infancy stage, it is already mitigating challenges associated with data encryption, data management features, along with reducing downtime and augmenting performance of data centers.