User Review
( votes)
Cloud Infrastructure- During the past 15 years, cloud computing has evolved from being a technical novelty to something that underpins many aspects of daily business activity.
Organizations that were wary of entrusting their core applications and data to a third party have become comfortable with the concept and understand the significant benefits it can deliver. Some have reached the stage where they are now 100% cloud based.
This evolution has been supported by the rise of a number of large public cloud service providers. Lead by companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google, these providers offer access to virtually unlimited storage and compute resources.
Yet, while these services deliver clear and significant business benefits, they have also created some challenges when it comes to data management. Many organizations have, probably inadvertently, reached the point where they have created a number of data silos with different sets stored within different cloud providers.
For example, the finance department might be using Azure while the sales department keeps its data within salesforce.com. At the same time, marketing might have become reliant on AWS while the research and development team makes extensive use of Google’s cloud.
This can make it difficult to access and use data in a holistic way. To access and combine different data sets can be come a complex and time-consuming technical challenge. As a result, many organizations can find they are missing out on opportunities to extract the maximum value from the data they have at their disposal.
The rise of the data cloud
To overcome this challenge, there is a new development within the public cloud environment. The data cloud evolves cloud computing from being an infrastructure into being a service.
In this new environment, organizations can make use of the cloud without needing to worry about the specifics of the platform underpinning it. Just like you can make use of Netflix or Spotify without needing to know the cloud resources they use, so an organization can take the same approach with its data. The cloud shifts from being a resource to being more like an application that can be put to work within an organization.
Thanks to the data cloud, an organization can access and use its data as though it is being stored in a single location. IT teams no longer have to worry about having separate connections to multiple stores of data.
Time and effort can instead be focused on making better use of all available data. It can be accessed, analyzed and reported on as easily as it if was all stored in a single database or data warehouse.
Introducing a data exchange
For organizations with large numbers of data sets, it can be challenging for everyone to know about everything that is available for use. In these circumstances, a data exchange can provide an effective solution.
