Enterprise cloud adoption rates have increased rapidly in the last decade. There’s never been a better time to embrace the cloud than now, especially when it comes to optimising the value of data analytics. That’s why many enterprises are replacing their big data warehouses (based on traditional data warehouse architectures) with cloud data warehouses and data lakes.
Why move to a cloud data warehouse?
For starters, cloud data warehousing enables enterprises to integrate data from multiple channels. Then business intelligence (BI) tools can be applied to derive meaningful insights from the integrated data. It’s worth noting that BI tools by themselves are very limited in terms of their data preparation capabilities, and this is where cloud data warehousing comes into play. They enable BI tools to tap into a wealth of high quality and correctly structured data that can be relied upon to create actionable business insights.
Cloud data warehouses and data lakes are the beating heart of the modern data analytics architecture. With a large data warehouse in the cloud, enterprises can sustainably and economically store huge amounts of data, while gaining significant benefits through advanced data analytics.
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Cloud data warehouse benefits
Minimise costs
Cloud providers will take care of all your hardware, upgrades, maintenance and outage management. This makes a cloud data warehouse less expensive than running your own on-premise infrastructure.
Optimised data security
With a single point of access, cloud data security is simplified, which can make it safer than on-premise data storage. Cloud also allows additional safety measures to be incorporated into the data strategy, including VPNs and cloud encryption.
Peace of mind
Leading cloud data warehousing providers such as Microsoft, Google and AWS report uptime of 99.99% and any issues are dealt with rapidly by highly experienced global teams. This means cloud can truly deliver anywhere and anytime access to services, BI tools and ultimately your data. Plus, the heightened level of service reliability improves customer experiences while providing a robust platform for business continuity.
Scalable and accessible
A key feature of cloud-based infrastructure is scalability. Cloud data warehouses are flexible and scalable enough to meet an enterprise’s data requirements in line with fluctuating or growing demand, without data volume restrictions.
Data lake or data warehouse?
If you are considering a cloud-based data storage solution, it’s important that you know the difference between a data lake and a data warehouse. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, there are major differences when it comes to the structure and purpose of each one.
Data lake
- A vast pool of unstructured data, the purpose (use case) of which is undetermined.
- Data stored within a data lake is highly accessible
- Data is raw and requires specialist tools and data scientists to make good use of it
Data warehouse
- A data repository for structured and filtered data stored with a definite purpose.
- Data stored within a data warehouse is more complex and costly to change or update.
- Data is processed and can be used by business professionals
When considering cloud data storage, you need to account for these differences and choose a solution that best suits your business requirements. You may need a hybrid solution with a data lake and a warehouse.
Unlock the true value of your data
Dufrain’s cloud data warehousing and data lake solutions will power your data analytics, enabling you to gain deeper insights and make better business decisions. Our experts can help you build a cloud data warehousing solution or migrate an on-premises data warehouse to the cloud.
We partner with all the major cloud providers, which means we can implement cloud-agnostic data systems for your organisation.