Cloud Data Warehouses are the future of data storage. We are not saying it; numbers say it. According to the latest Statista report, 50 percent of enterprises worldwide have their workloads in the public cloud. In addition, of the 750 respondents, 46 percent reported that they have data in the public cloud. Over the last decade, there has been a rapid transition to the cloud across industries, and it’s pretty clear which way the tide is rolling.
Today, big companies like Apple, Facebook, Linkedin, and Tesla, among others, rely on Big Data to gather intel and make quick business decisions. This requires real-time insights and live data streaming, which is impossible with the traditional data warehouse. Enter the world of cloud data warehouses. They not only provide instant access to systematic data but also secure it.
Considering how e-commerce and social media platforms have massively changed consumer behavior and how they interact with businesses, there has been a massive surge in consumer data, referred to as Big Data. The surge has been too large and expensive for a traditional infrastructure to manage and store. This is where cloud data warehouses come into the picture. Let’s take a look at how the cloud helps businesses stay abreast with modern requirements.
Why Traditional Data Warehouses Are a Thing of Past?
As mentioned already, Big Data is far too big and expensive for traditional data warehouses to manage and store. You see, in the past, businesses needed to store data for small-scale usage cases like maintaining inventory, customer contact information, and flight schedules. The data pool and pace were slower, and the systems used to compute data queries were more than capable of delivering timely results.
With the surging volume, velocity, and variety of data resulting from the online boom, expanding hardware, IT team, and maintenance required for the on-prem or traditional data warehouse gets costly. And the amount of data is only expected to grow exponentially over the years.
Take, for instance, the example of Apple. Its impressive range of iPhones, iPods, MacBooks, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac has billions of users worldwide. Not to forget the use of its parallel services like iCloud, SIRI, App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, and others. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine the magnitude of volume, velocity, and variety of data Apple deals with continuously. Each and every product of Apple communicates back to Apple’s data warehouse on a minute-to-minute basis.
Since Apple deals with the sensitive personal information of its users, Apple uses the Teradata data warehouse. Because of the sheer volume of data handled, it became the fastest client of Teradata to reach Petabyte scale in a Teradata warehouse. Apple currently operates a multiple-petabyte Teradata system. While there’s no record of how much it costs, one can safely assume that it costs the moon, and then some more. Not to forget the team of Data Warehouse Engineers and staff hired by the Cupertino-based tech giant.
But herein lies the caveat, with a market value of $2.25 trillion as of April 2021; Apple is the world’s largest company in 2021. Not every company has Apple’s clout and resources, which is why it’s best to make a switch to cloud data storage to save costs and increase efficiency.
Why is Cloud Data Warehouse the Future of Data Storage?
By definition, a cloud data warehouse is a centralized data repository stored online on the cloud. The setup doesn’t require the purchase of expensive hardware and staff. The scalability and flexibility of the cloud platforms allow enterprises to effectively handle and manage the sheer volume and velocity of the data and enhanced computing prowess and storage whenever needed.
A modern cloud data warehouse is designed to offer exceptional accessibility and higher accessibility for various business teams to obtain data-driven insights to facilitate faster decision-making.
Snowflake and Redshift are two of the most popular and secure cloud data warehouses. While Snowflake is a more modern solution, Redshift is one of the oldest platforms. You can read a detailed comparison of Redshift vs Snowflake to learn more about the aspects that businesses need to consider while choosing a cloud data warehouse.
Here are five reasons why cloud data warehouses are the future.
- Cost-effective: Unlike traditional solutions, a cloud-based data warehouse requires minimal upfront costs. There are no IT infrastructures, hardware, or staff. It helps enterprises cut down investments as well as operational costs.
- Enterprise-grade security: Most cloud data warehouses offer internal security controls and protocols to keep sensitive business data safe. There are advanced security and encryption tools to protect business data from cyber attacks.
- Scalability: Unlike a traditional data warehouse, which requires additional hardware and staff to grow in scale, the cloud data warehouse can facilitate large-scale expansion with no issues. This is particularly beneficial for companies that outgrow their computational and storage needs quite fast. All they need to do is to upgrade their plan without any capital investment to scale.
- Data integration: If Forbes’s State of Date Integration 2020 report is to be believed, more than 80 percent of business operation leaders consider data integration a critical part of ongoing operations. With the amount of data influx today, enterprises focus on data integration for analytics and Business Intelligence initiatives. Cloud data warehouses are compatible with third-party data integration tools and can easily integrate data from multiple sources.
- Improved accessibility and availability: It goes without saying that enterprises need accurate and timely insights to make quick and intelligent business decisions. A traditional data warehouse is characterized by slow processing resulting in outdated insights. Moreover, since they are dependent on hardware and operators, they are more prone to downtime. On the other hand, the cloud data warehouse facilitates almost real-time updates for quick analytics and is constantly available.
It’s pretty evident by now that unless you can splurge billions and billions of dollars like Apple does on advanced data warehouse systems like Terabyte, cloud platforms are the way forward. Not only are cloud data warehouses super secure, but they are also speedy and reliable.
Suppose you run a company that goes through a vast volume of data at a rapid pace for analytics and business intelligence initiatives. In that case, it only makes sense to go for the cloud data warehouse. In the end, the advanced data reporting and analytics capabilities of a modern-day cloud data warehouse will help improve your business’s bottom line.
