Managing data can be challenging in any environment. But data management in the cloud is especially difficult, given the unique security, cost and performance issues at play. With that reality in mind, here are some tips to help IT teams optimize clouddata managementand strike the right balance among the various competing priorities that shape data in public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
Before delving into best practices for cloud data management, let’s briefly discuss why managing data in the cloud can be particularly challenging. The main reasons include:
Those are the problems. Now, let’s look at five ways to tackle them.
A basic best practice for striking the right balance between cloud storage costs and performance is to use data storage tiers. Most public cloud providers offerdifferent storage tiers(or classes, as they are called on some clouds) for at least their object storage services.
The higher-cost tiers offer instant access to data. With lower-cost tiers, you may have to wait some amount of time--which could range from minutes to hours--to access your data. Data that doesn’t require frequent or quick access, then, can be stored much more cheaply using lower-cost tiers.
For many teams, object storage services like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage are the default solution for storing data in the cloud. These services let you upload data in any form and retrieve it quickly. You don’t have to worry about structuring the data in a particular way or configuring a database.
The downside of cloud object storage is that you usually have to pay fees to interact with the data. For instance, if you want to list the contents of your storage bucket or copy a file, you’ll pay a fee for each request. The request fees are very small--fractions of a penny--but they can add up if you are constantly accessing or modifying object storage data.
You don’t typically have to pay special request fees to perform data operations on other types of cloud storage services, like block storage or cloud databases. Thus, from a cost optimization perspective, it may be worth forgoing the convenience of object storage in order to save money.
One of the key security challenges that teams face when managing cloud data is the risk that they don’t actually know where all of their sensitive data is within cloud environments. It can be easy to upload files containing personally identifiable information or other types of private data into the cloud and lose track of it (especially if your cloud environment is shared by a number of users within your organization, each doing their own thing with few governance policies to manage operations).
