Cloud computing and big data: Three compelling market trends making a case for cloud data
Data and cloud are two critical elements of any digital transformation that no organisation aspiring to succeed can afford to ignore.
The benefits of cloud are no longer debated – it brings speed, agility and lowers total cost of operations for enterprises, without worrying about managing or maintaining IT infrastructure. But for organisations to innovate, we need another key ingredient – data.
Cloud enables organisations to store, consume and process data with both speed and scale in order to derive value for business actions. It allows the focus to shift to innovation with new business models and value-creation opportunities.
Let’s look at three of the compelling market trends that form the case for cloud and big data.
Cloud-native architecture when applied to data, breaks through the siloes of data extraction and modelling created by teams from different business units and makes it global and fluid, removing not just redundancy of data assets that is often customised to suit the needs of individual teams, but creating a data platform that threads across every architecture layer in the enterprise.
Based on a framework of microservices and DevOps, data platforms connect the infrastructure, data and applications in an organisation and facilitate the provision of ‘data as a service’, wherein, not only do internal stakeholders gain access to the data stored in various repositories via APIs but it opens the door for all the partners including external agencies that form part of the business ecosystem to participate and contribute to this data, thus encouraging innovative collaboration and monetisation of data.
As organisations grow in their business, it also addresses the need to scale up. Taking this a step further is the opportunity to generate meaningful insights using AI and data analytics. Data, therefore, becomes boundary-less and consumption becomes purpose-driven encouraging enterprises to bring self-service capabilities in addition to creating the pressure to maintaining high-levels of accuracy and security.
An enterprise must be conscious of its responsibilities when creating this cloud-enabled data platform:
Data security: Most cloud vendors offer services that are in compliance with federal data governance standards. However, while implementing data security on the cloud, it is essential for enterprises to take responsibility and ensure that it aligns with the enterprise-level security strategy and complies with the relevant international laws on data privacy and usage.
