MongoDB Looks to Accelerate Transition to the Cloud

As more enterprise IT organizations embrace the MongoDB document database, a much higher percentage of them are starting to be deployed in a cloud managed by MongoDB. In fact, Sahir Azam, vice president of cloud products for MongoDB, says MongoDB expects that half of the customers that pay for it to support the open source database will soon be deployed in its cloud.

This week, MongoDB strengthened its MongoDB Atlas cloud service by adding a utility that makes it simpler to move data from an instance of MongoDB running on premise into the MongoDB Atlas service. In addition, MongoDB announced that it is making available a free tier of service on MongoDB Atlas that can be employed to host applications on a database that consumes up to 512MB of storage.

Azam says beyond the fact that organizations can take advantage of MongoDB personnel to manage their cloud service, the MongoDB service comes with the added benefit of having all the MongoDB security features turned on by default. There’s been a spate of cybersecurity attacks specifically targeting MongoDB databases. Many of those attacks have been successful because developers that opted to deploy their application on MongoDB did not turn on security features such as authentication and encryption, says Azam.

“A lot of it comes down to pilot error,” says Azam.

In general, Azam says that as IT organizations become more comfortable with document databases, MongoDB finds itself engaging more with IT operations teams, including database administrators, than developers. Many of those IT operation teams, notes Azam, are engaged in migrating an application or some component of one on to a MongoDB database to take advantage of a lower cost database platform that is not as complex to manage as a traditional relational database.

Initially viewed as a database platform suitable for only “toy” workloads, Azam says organizations of all sizes are now building scalable systems of engagement on top of the company’s document database. The issue now is determining to what degree those organizations want to focus on managing those applications versus the underlying infrastructure they run on.