Authored by: Deb Dutta, General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at Datastax
Demand for data in Asia Pacific will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27.2% over the next three years, as the region leads the way in embracing emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT).
By 2025, China will generate more data than the United States, according to a study from IDC and Seagate. The Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region is also one of the fastest growing datasphere regions in the world. Data generated in the APJ region will increase from 5.9 ZB in 2018 to 33.8 ZB in 2025, making up a substantial 19.3% of the global datasphere.
Driven by Asia Pacific’s voracious appetite for data and the region’s concentration of cloud native upstarts, existing enterprises and companies in vertical markets such as financial services, gaming and ecommerce, the cloud database market in the Asia Pacific is expected to skyrocket by 117% up to US$288 billion by 2024, according to a report by GlobalData.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, the adoption of new advanced technologies will also be a key driver for the cloud market growth. IDC predicts that the cloud services market in the Southeast Asian region will reach a staggering US$40.32 billion by 2025.
With such exponential growth of data, relational databases, though still useful, weren't built for today’s real-time applications, nor are they being used for customer experience due to issues with scale and performance. NoSQL technologies have been around for a while but are now stepping in to fill the gap. The NoSQL market is expected to increase tenfold to an estimated US$22.08 billion by 2026.
For CIOs, CTOs, digital leaders and the developers behind the new innovations to come in Asia Pacific, these are exciting times.
Implementing NoSQL to support real-time, multi-region applications that power our daily lives is worth the effort for innovation and growth. How do leaders get organisational buy-in, especially in conservative societies? Will it fit in with legacy systems? How do leaders plan for data migration? Do organisations have the right skills to implement NoSQL?
Is NoSQL right for your organisation?
For organisations with projects that require scale and large amounts of data, such as real-time personalisation, user profile management, engaging web applications, mobile applications, Internet of Things, and so on, NoSQL is the answer. Specifically, Apache Cassandra as it is a distributed NoSQL database designed to handle large amounts of data with high availability, low latency, at global scale and with no single point of failure. This is key for organisations with global reach and the need for 24x7 uptime with high performance.
Enterprises in Asia are recognising this and rapidly adopting cloud-based open-source NoSQL DBMS, especially for their new applications. NoSQL’s infrastructure distributes data across multiple nodes in a single data cluster according to a custom replication factor, typically three. This optimises both reads and writes with zero-downtime and allows applications to scale out.
In the Asia Pacific region, as more modern, real-time applications are built to engage customers (mobile retail applications, personalised streaming with recommendations, mobile food and beverage ordering, in-the-moment fraud detection and crypto currency transactions), companies are looking to NoSQL databases for agile real time insights and pay-as-you-grow pricing models that significantly push down TCO.
Organisations working with big data, or in fast-growing, non-traditional industries like Gaming, e-Commerce, and FinTech, are opting for NoSQL as the answer to accelerate innovation and time to market. Other business goals can include: building mobile-first real time applications, lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), real time insight to improve customer experience, ease of integration with existing and new technologies to make data available to the entire data ecosystem including data lakes and data warehouses, and boosting performance, efficiency, and stability.
A high-performing cloud Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) is the perfect solution to scalability, performance, availability, developer productivity, operational simplicity and massive TCO reduction. However, do organisations have the skills and buy-in from decision makers to make the switch?
What to consider when picking a NoSQL database
No doubt, NoSQL databases are disruptive, especially within the relational database world. It is common to want to preserve the status quo, the inherent desire to do things the way they’ve always been done. But without change, there’s no innovation. Developing a solid use case with a clear understanding of what an organisation is trying to achieve, is the first step to a successful NoSQL project.
Ask any start-up and they will tell you - these agile entities were ‘born in the cloud’ - their requirements of scale, performance, agility and TCO are unlikely to be delivered by RDBMS technology. This category of users are not just innovative SMEs but include global Unicorns (companies with more than US$1 billion in valuation) which are growing at a blistering pace.
Other than understanding the use case and the disruptive changes brought about by the new technology, identifying the key architects and technical leads who can help shape those processes and get their organisations on board is essential. Developers are the keys to success with NoSQL as they are the life of new, high-growth applications. Giving them APIs to make the dev tools they love to connect with a NoSQL database is crucial.
5 reasons NoSQL is crucial for speed and innovation
With applications that demand massive volumes of data and speed-to-market, NoSQL databases like the open source Apache Cassandra database offer the scale, throughput, flexibility, efficiency, and availability to keep up with the speed and scale of innovation. Here are five compelling reasons to migrate to a NoSQL database like Cassandra.
Reason #1: Serverless Cassandra reduces costs by 75%
Today’s legacy datastores are not only expensive to manage, but also difficult to scale, maintain and update for operators. Legacy systems can add up to high ownership costs since infrastructure, support and upgrades for an older system cost much more than investing in new software.
Moving to the cloud with a ‘managed service’ eliminates the costs of procuring maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure. Instead, you pay for what you consume, ultimately reducing the total cost of ownership.
By helping organisations deliver their apps to market faster at much lower cost, Cassandra has been proven to reduce the total cost of ownership by 75% over 3 years, according to a GigaOm report. Other benefits include: 95% less staffing costs, 3 times less complexity, and 44% lower infrastructure costs.
Reason #2: Performance, speed, and availability
Today’s customers demand speed and seamlessness from an organisation’s web and mobile applications. In fact, the Flexera CIO Priorities Report in 2020 revealed that customers are the main drivers of digital transformation activities. This makes it crucial for enterprises to adopt data solutions that are suitable for modern applications and offer scalability, performance, speed, availability and real time insights.
NoSQL databases like Cassandra accelerate query response times and supercharge the performance of even the most intense operational cloud applications. Always available, Cassandra is ideal for global applications that have to run 24/7 for users across the world. Data is always accessible and never lost. What’s more, Cassandra’s built-in repair services fix problems immediately when they occur, without any manual intervention.
Reason #3: A more secure cloud NoSQL
According to IBM, the average cost of a single data breach was US$4.24 million in 2021. The Asia Pacific saw the second highest increase in cyber risk, just after North America.
Legacy systems are no longer as secure as cloud-native applications, because it’s harder to get security support and updates from a legacy system provider. Most legacy systems are also not compatible with advanced security features like multi-factor authentication or encryption methods.
Moving to cloud NoSQL removes some of these security concerns, although not entirely. But most cloud database providers offer extensive services and technical support that can help you prevent and combat cyberattacks.
Reason #4: Mobile compatibility
Smartphones are an integral part of our lives and play a critical role in the digital transformation process. In 2021, 96.51% of the population in Korea assessed the internet through their mobile phones. In the wider APAC, more than 80% of internet connections will be through smartphones by 2025.
With high mobile usage across the region, developing mobile applications is key to staying competitive in the market. For retail companies especially, mobile apps are crucial to driving sales as 63% of consumers within the Asia Pacific shop via a mobile app.
Fast access to massive volumes of data is key to delivering seamless mobile apps, since outdated software cannot keep up with this demand. Cloud-based Cassandra eliminates the need to constantly request data from the server; instead, data is embedded in the database and automatically synchronised with the cloud or remote servers.
Reason #5: Delivering exceptional customer experiences
Fueled by the pandemic and restrictions, Asia has become home to half of the world’s internet users in 2020 with a total of 2.3 billion. This new era of digital-first consumers is forcing companies to adopt digital transformation strategies to provide more value and connectivity to their customers. 86% of businesses believe that cloud technology is key.
Cloud technology empowers companies to be fast, dynamic, and agile. With cloud-based Cassandra, an organisation can easily connect its web and mobile applications to its database and gain valuable customer insights to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
NoSQL is purpose built for modern day applications, since traditional RDBMS, with its apparent limitations, can no longer help an organisation thrive. Implementing NoSQL systems into an organisation is a paradigm shift, but worth the effort to drive innovation and growth.
