Cloud Computing and Big Data: Everything you Need to Know

Featured article by Namita Awasthi, Business and Content Strategist 

Cloud computing has transformed the way organizations manage and interact with their data. Over the last few years, several organizations, including small and mid-sized companies, have migrated their data workloads and computing to the cloud. And the trend continues.

As per a recent Forrester report, cloud computing will firmly establish itself as the foundation of future enterprise application platforms in 2019 and cloud spending will increase as enterprises adopt cloud tools and services in whatever way they can.

Benefits of moving Big Data to the Cloud

The key advantage of moving your Big Data to the cloud is that it helps you offload data storage and management overheads to the cloud so that you can focus on your core business. You do not need to build and maintain costly Big Data infrastructure or acquire skills to manage it. The service provider takes care of all administrative tasks such as back-ups, infrastructure health, disaster management, maintenance, and more. This helps you shift focus from managing the data to using it to solve your business problems. Besides saving time, it also helps in cutting down costs associated with setting up and maintaining an on-premise Big Data infrastructure.

The cloud offers unlimited scalability allowing you to quickly scale up to meet your growing requirements. The elastic nature of the cloud optimizes resource utilization by helping you add resources during peak times and release them as soon as the load decreases. Another major advantage of the cloud is that it allows users to access data and services on an anytime, anywhere basis. This improves analytics as anyone across the organization can access Big Data from anywhere and on any device.

Besides this, cloud computing improves the agility of your Big Data platform. You can easily integrate new data sources, deal with the exploding data volumes, and respond faster to changes in the data environment. The unlimited storage and elasticity helps you scale up quickly to match the speed of Big Data.

Cloud Computing enables Big Data Analytics for All

Small and mid-sized organizations often find it difficult to build their Big Data infrastructure as it needs heavy investments and specialized skill-sets. Cloud computing helps them leverage Big Data without the cumbersome task of setting up the entire infrastructure. They can experiment with new forms of data and use the insights for business benefits. Such initiatives are extremely cost-effective as they pay only for the resources they need and only till they need them.

Moreover, the same environment that takes months and years of effort and planning, can be set up in matter of days in the cloud. This helps organization try out new ideas quickly and expand their data platforms once they start seeing value in it.

Few challenges of Cloud Computing

Moving Big Data to the cloud becomes challenging for organizations who have already invested heavily in their Big Data infrastructure. It becomes difficult for them to justify the additional costs as they have already incurred heavy investments in setting up their on-premise data platforms. Sometimes, the IT teams are not happy as they need to pass control to third parties. Therefore, it becomes important to justify the long-term benefits of the move to all stakeholders. Data security and governance concerns also deter organizations from moving their Big Data to the cloud. However, most cloud vendors today offer secure models that help you overcome these challenges through careful planning and proper implementation.

Analytics in the cloud

As the volume of data increases, most business intelligence and analytics tools tend to slow down and fail to deliver on performance. Big Data Analytics in the cloud becomes challenging if your tools are unable to perform on Big Data. Therefore, as you move your data to the cloud, you also need to move analytics to the cloud.

Once you build your Big Data analytics platform in the cloud, you do not have to move petabytes of data from one place to another for analytics. The data is stored in the cloud and it is also leveraged for analytics. This ensures that users can access their Big Data faster and utilize it for making their business decisions.

Together they will shape the future of businesses

Weighing the benefits and the challenges, moving to the cloud is a trend that cannot be ignored. As more and more data gets accumulated in the future, it makes sense for organizations to leverage cloud computing for Big Data analytics to shape the future of their business.

AUTHOR BIO:

Namita Awasthi is a business and content strategist who writes about technologies and innovations that business decision makers need to know about. She has over 15 years of experience in writing and works for Kyvos Insights, a leading BI on Big Data solution provider.