Top 5 Reasons why you need a Data Expert in your Agile/Cloud-only Company

1. Setup blue/green database environments to streamline database deployments
2. Help your team transition from a monolithic database to a microservice environment 
3. Setup testing environments with actual data to test against (eg, docker database containers with anonymised data)
4. Improve the performance of your production databases
5. Setup and populate reporting Data-warehouses/Data-lakes for fast and readily available analytics

Worst 5 Things that can happen if you don’t have a Data Expert in your Agile/Cloud-only company

1. Your production databases slow down your website/mobile apps so much that the developers want to take 3 months to off to migrate sensitive parts of your application to 3 new database technologies. You now not only need to maintain unfamiliar database technologies, you also need to fix support tickets like “why does it say the total is 50 here, but the total is 43 over there? Which one is right?”.
2. Every time you deploy database changes after a few extra weeks of testing, everyone still holds their breath while it deploys.
3. After a couple of years of hard work trying to move your monolith to microservices, only 5-10% of the database has been migrated. The momentum has stopped, because no one is willing to risk their positions and break key parts of the system.
4. Your developers still need to test against the staging environment as that is the one that has data in it, but by then, all the bad database queries have already been written.
5. After having 1 monolithic database and 20 silo’d databases sitting inside microservices, you now need to hire a data expert to go over all the mess and create a single place to run reports from. Otherwise, no one has an idea what’s going on.