Recently, FTI has been tracking how government agencies are leveraging apps and other mobile and social technologies to deliver services more efficiently and effectively to end users. What we’ve observed is that led by the GSA, the Department of Health and Human Services, NASA, and NOAA, government agencies are making excellent use of mobile and social platforms to meet their agencies’ missions and more agencies are adding to the momentum each day. However, one question that came to mind is: Are agencies building a robust infrastructure on the back-end to accommodate all of this additional data?
There are several pieces of technology that need to be brought together in order to create a network infrastructure that can deliver data to end users with the speed and availability that we all demand. Moving data to the cloud has been well established as the first step in this process. But another critical component is ensuring that the database infrastructure is also scalable. What more and more IT teams are discovering is that previous generation databases, the ones that were built for ERP-type applications are not up to the challenge of managing the demands of Web applications and are prone to slow performance or outright failure.
So, what should IT teams look for when the time comes to upgrade their databases? In addition to scalability factors to consider should include:
- Product maturity
- Wide availability of competencies
- Ubiquity of platforms and languages
- Integration with third party tools
- Presence of an active support community
