Wikibon sees the cloud as the future of data warehousing. As an enterprise hub for operational decision support, advanced analytics, data governance, and many other use cases, the data warehouse can generally do its job faster, more scalably, and more cost-effectively in a cloud environment.
For organizations that have deployed data warehouses on premises and managed them with their own IT staff, the key issue is not whether they should migrate these investments to a fully managed public cloud but how soon and with what operational handoff. Nevertheless, before you get to the point where you’re migrating your data to a cloud-based DW, you’ll need to investigate all the technical issues and make a solid business case for doing so.
Here are the top trends that are driving users to do data warehousing primarily in the cloud:
- Cloud data warehousing is now the mainstream. The cloud has become most users’ preferred approach for acquiring data warehousing capabilities. Cloud-based data warehouses are an increasingly fundamental part of many companies’ application infrastructures. Fewer users deploy their data warehouses on appliance form factors, or build them out and manage this capability through licensed software on commodity hardware inside their data centers.
- Cloud data warehouses are growing increasingly comprehensive. More enterprises are deploying cloud data warehouses as convergence platforms for a wide range of operational data applications. Cloud data warehouses support acquisition, aggregation, storage, and processing of data from disparate sources and in different formats. And they support optimized deployments as business-intelligence back-ends, data-governance hubs, analytic data marts, multistructured information refineries, and even transactional computing platforms.
- Cloud data warehouses are getting faster all the time. They support users’ mission-critical requirements for real-time, interactive analytics on data in motion and at rest. They accelerate efficient, in-database parallel processing of analytic algorithm libraries in the cloud. They provide built-in low-latency performance with in-memory technology and efficient compression. And they facilitate agile scaling of as data volumes and varieties grow.
- Cloud data warehouses are the essence of simplicity. They are available on-demand through pay-as-you-go, fully managed subscription services that may be spun up at a moment’s notice. They eliminate the need for customers to invest in hardware, software, and IT staff. They support easy load-and-go provisioning. And they deliver high performance, stringent security, and dynamic workflow management from the start with no need for manual tuning.
- Cloud data warehouses offer the most flexible deployment options. In addition to being available in public cloud environments, the various functional components of data warehousing environments—including landing, transformation, storage, and query—may be deployed onto various public and private cloud platforms and integrated within hybrid architectures.
I hope you’ll be joining Attunity, Snowflake, and me this coming Tuesday, September 12, 1:00 pm ET / 10:00 am PT, for the live webinar “Top Trends for Moving Your Data to the Data Warehouse in the Cloud.” We will be discussing these trends and explaining what you need to know about why, where, and how you should be migrating your data to cloud-based data warehouses. I’ll be joined by Jordan Martz, Director of Technology Solutions, Attunity, and Ross Perez, Director of Product Marketing, Snowflake Computing.
Please follow this link to register for the webinar. We look forward to engaging with you.
