Database management approach: does adopting a DBMS introduce additional costs and risks for an organization? Explain whether this statement is accurate.

Introduction / Context:
Organizations often move from file-based processing to a database management system (DBMS) to gain consistency, sharing, and security. However, the shift to the database approach is not free. This question asks whether adopting a DBMS introduces additional costs and risks, beyond the well-known benefits such as reduced redundancy and better integrity.

Given Data / Assumptions:

• The term database approach refers to centralizing data with a DBMS, enforcing schemas, constraints, and shared access.
• Costs include software licenses, hardware, cloud spend, training, and ongoing administration.
• Risks include availability risks, consolidation risk (central point of failure), security misconfiguration, migration risks, and vendor lock-in.

Concept / Approach:
Moving to a DBMS centralizes control and elevates data to a managed corporate resource. While this increases discipline, it also increases dependency on the DBMS platform and the team operating it. The total cost of ownership includes procurement, deployment, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, patching, and auditing. Risk analysis spans confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Centralization concentrates risk exposure: an outage or breach can affect many applications simultaneously.

Step-by-Step Solution:

Verification / Alternative check:
Conduct a proof of concept and a total cost of ownership analysis. Review service-level objectives and incident history to validate availability and performance risk mitigation strategies.

Why Other Options Are Wrong:

• Incorrect: Ignores clear, common cost and risk categories.
• Only true for startups/cloud: Size and hosting model change magnitude, not the existence, of costs/risks.
• Cannot be determined: While exact amounts vary, the presence of added costs/risks is well established.

Common Pitfalls:
Underestimating migration, training, and ongoing operations; assuming cloud eliminates operational responsibilities; overlooking governance and change management.

Final Answer:
Correct