3 Ways to Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with EDB Postgres

Amid global macroeconomic uncertainty, companies are constantly searching for ways to reduce costs. Optimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO) remains a high priority for all business leaders.

One approach that companies are adopting to reduce TCO is the transition from proprietary software to open source database solutions. By selecting EDB Postgres, organizations can achieve more than just a reduction in software operating expenditure, they can also streamline migrations, automate administrative tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver greater value.

What is TCO?

Total cost of ownership (TCO) in this case, refers to the combination of people, hardware and software costs of running a database platform. This metric is key for forecasting the long-term cost of investing in a new database platform and quantifying the likely return on investment. 

Below are three approaches to reduce TCO:

Optimize Your Software Costs

This can take many forms. Below we introduce a few (hopefully obvious) but practical steps to reduce your software costs: 

• Validate your usage: Regularly review the necessity for the vendor products / tools you use. Check the terms and ensure you are not overpaying for services or support levels you do not need.
• Standardize Platforms: Consolidate tools that serve the same purpose
• Maintain your systems: By running up to date software you may be able to avoid the costs associated with addressing vulnerabilities or compatibility issues.
• Renegotiate with your vendors: Consider volume licensing / contract consolidation
• Cloud Services: In some cases public cloud may offer cost efficiencies, particularly when coupled with “pay as you go” usage or services where version upgrades are included.
• Open Source Software: Many companies we work with are on a journey to find alternatives to legacy commercial software providers. PostgreSQL is leading the charge in the database space and for years has been the developers favorite. 

EDB offers decades of Postgres expertise and a broad portfolio of enterprise grade tooling to help you safely and efficiently deploy, operate and securely manage your Postgres databases. This combination allows companies to take advantage of one of the most advanced open source databases available, even for your most critical applications.

Be flexible in where you run your workloads

Keeping an open mind on where you choose to run your workloads can help you reap financial rewards. As an example, it may be more advantageous to run some workloads on existing amortized hardware on premise rather than port to the public cloud. On the other hand, adopting public clouds for new workloads and taking advantage of “pre-built” CSP capabilities can avoid significant capex outlay in the build out of required infrastructure and also reduced people costs in engineering and deployment.

Public cloud adoption is as much an operating model change as it is a reduction in required on premise rack space and power consumption. Cloud adoption can facilitate the delegation of some of the most laborious IT management and maintenance tasks to your CSP of choice allowing you to focus on building revenue-generating business applications. 

EDB offers fully managed PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres Advanced Server services, as well as the industry leading Postgres high availability solution, EDB Postgres Distributed, in Microsoft Azure, AWS and GCP. We also have an industry leading Postgres operator solution for customers who prefer to self manage. This is available on premise or in the public cloud IaaS environment of your choice. 
 

Improve Process Efficiency and Increase Automation

When processes become more efficient, they often require fewer resources, less time, and can reduce errors or redundancies, all of which can contribute to a reduction in costs.

Automating repetitive tasks such as database provisioning and configuration is one proven way to reduce costs. Not only are manual database builds laborious and time consuming, they are also prone to error. 

At EDB, for customers who prefer to self-manage their environments, we focus on helping you build highly automated database as-a-service offerings, deploying a variety of different approaches, from industry standard orchestration tools, to proprietary EDB tools such as Trusted Postgres Architect to deploying more modern and configuration driven Kubernetes operator solutions to help streamline the deployment and management process, all the while introducing greater repeatability and reliability for application end consumers. Coupling this is enabling Infrastructure as Code (IAC) options can significantly enhance your developer experience. 
 

Moving Forward

Many organizations choose to migrate from traditional RDBMS (relational database management systems) to Open Source platforms like Postgres to gain better data flexibility, increased ability to quickly update applications as requirements change, and of course, much better scalability.

Migrating to EDB Postgres can reduce operating costs by up to 80% while also alleviating proprietary vendor lock-in, and providing excellent agility with technical teams able to easily tap into a community of worldwide developers. EDB Postgres provides enterprise features, quality, performance and reliability, while significantly reducing infrastructure software costs.

For over 20 years, EDB has been migrating databases to Postgres—the most loved and wanted database in the world, according to Stack Overflow's annual developer survey. With EDB’s native Oracle compatibility, you can migrate all your applications to Postgres seamlessly.

Contact EDB for a free migration business value assessment