Database as a Service (DBaaS) is often seen as a way to lift and shift the responsibility of on-premise databases, but it can also be a pathway to address frontend development challenges — such as web and application speed.

There’s a trend towards providing “very low-latency” access to data and it’s ramping up fast, Barry Morris, general manager of in-memory databases at Amazon, told The New Stack. This trend is exacerbated by the emergence of 5G, because people expect even faster responses from applications with faster network speeds, he added.

To provide a sense of the scale at which the cloud provider operates, Morris said that Amazon has more than 650,000 databases that have been migrated to AWS using the database migration service.

According to Morris, there is trend towards “building database systems that respond very, very quickly; and what we’re talking about here is under a millisecond.”

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While developers are concerned with speed, what concerns CIOs and CEOs is how that data can be put to use for the business, Morris said. Most organizations today are concerned with being “data-driven” and application data can contain valuable insights for businesses. To that end, business and technology leaders are concerned about how data infrastructure can be leveraged for smarter business decisions, he said.

“Data isn’t just something that’s sitting in a database and supporting an app,” Morris said. “The big prize is, can you take that data and do analytics on it? Can you take that data and figure out patterns from the past and so on? Even, can you do machine learning types of analyses on it?”

While the appeal at first may have been just lifting and shifting from on-premise databases to the cloud, there’s additional value that enterprises will find there, he contended.