Larry Weber and Yoav Eilat are product marketing managers at Amazon Web Services.

On April 24, Forrester published The Forrester Wave: Database-as-a-Service Wave, Q2 2017, in which AWS is named as a Leader, receiving the highest score for Current Offerings, Strategy, and Market Presence. There were 13 vendors in the evaluation.

According to Forrester, “AWS not only has the largest adoption of DBaaS, it also offers the widest range of offerings to support analytical, operational, and transactional workloads.” AWS was the only vendor to receive a 5.0 of 5 on in the data security criterion. Forrester notes that “AWS’s key strengths lay in its dynamic scale, automated administration, flexibility of database offerings, strong security, and high-availability capabilities, which make it a preferred choice for customers.”

The Forrester report evaluated a number of AWS database services: Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MariaDB, Amazon RDS for Oracle, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift and Amazon ElastiCache.

A few things especially struck us while reading the report, but one really stood out: the statement that database-as-a-service has become critical for all enterprises.

Just three to four years back, very few people were moving their databases to the public cloud. Larry remembers demoing a managed database at a conference. He asked the question, “How many of you are leveraging the cloud for your transactional data?” The four or so hands that did go up were web-based startups. He then asked the question, “For the rest of you, do you have any plans in the future to manage your production data in the cloud?” Outside of a few pondering looks, the room was silent.

Fast forward to today, and it feels like DBaaS has become the new normal. Organizations are moving workloads as fast as possible to the cloud to reap the benefits of managed services, and we feel the Forrester report validates these trends. As with other cloud services, DBaaS isn’t just about saving money or moving from CapEx to OpEx. Instead, it’s about enabling companies to become more agile and competitive, and to rethink the way they do business. Cloud database services are fueling the growth of new business services, especially when scalability and rapid deployment are critical.

In the report, Forrester also mentions the AWS Database Migration Service, which helps you migrate your existing databases to AWS easily and securely. The service supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, and also heterogeneous migrations between different platforms such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. AWS DMS now supports over 10 source databases and over 10 target databases. We recently announced that customers have migrated over 28,000 databases using the service.

As you compare database services from different cloud providers, think about what it is you want to accomplish. Are you looking for a fully managed relational database? A fast and flexible NoSQL database service? A data warehouse? Here at AWS, the choice is always up to you. We encourage you to use the right tool for the job, as opposed to trying to solve all problems with a single database.

We’re very excited that customers such as Unilever, Intuit, Infor, Cornell University, and many others give high marks to our managed database services. We’re committed to developing services for you, our customers, and helping you experience database freedom. This is just the beginning.

Download a copy of Forrester’s Database-as-a-Service Wave.