Technology companies have listened to the masses to produce a pay-as-you-go data warehousing solution for the cloud. As a welcome addition to Platform as a Service and Infrastructures as a Service product lines, Data Warehousing as a Service (DWaaS) promises to be equally beneficial as a product and a service for ensuring dynamic, cloud-managed big data.
Although many businesses are pigeonholed into accepting the high costs of ownership for their data warehousing services, DWaaS now offers the alternative of purchasing a less expensive solution that has the same or a better level of performance. For large, medium-sized, and small businesses, DWaaS represents a wealth of potential opportunities to provide and use cloud-based big data services that, up to this point, would have been too expensive.
Conventional vendors combined data warehousing software with hardware, allowing hardware components such as processors to weigh in on pricing, but DWaaS provides a petabyte-scale platform that frees up businesses from data warehousing hardware concerns altogether. Moreover, DWaaS breaks down the barriers to using data in new and different ways, effectively unlocking the potential of data sources to create new streams of revenue.
DWaaS is super–data warehousing, offering:
Significant cost savings;
Less risk of data loss, data breach, and data leakage;
Greater control over data for disaster recovery purposes;
Larger capacity for data storage and handling;
Fully managed data pipes;
Access to data reporting and analysis;
Ease of data migration;
Data cleansing, data integrity, data scrubbing, and data clustering services;
Streamlined data integration with streaming applications; and
Flexible access to a repository of disparate data sources.
It’s only natural to think that some huge fear should be associated with trusting a business’ data to a hosted cloud environment, but with the Internet, smartphones, and Web hosting to their credit, hosted service providers have proven as reliable and efficient as a business’ own data center. If one were to visit a hosted service provider’s facility, it would be the equivalent of an offsite campus or onsite building in a separate location from the main network of users. DWaaS treats its customers as a network, thereby supporting its perception within IT as a trusted cloud-based service. DWaaS has a track record of success in protecting customer data and providing consistent, reliable data-processing services.
Key distinctions in cloud versus on-premises data warehousing are that the hosted service provider can beef up memory and implement other configurations that are known to be better than conventional configurations but are typically too expensive for businesses to maintain. For example, increasing memory accommodates distributed computing, allowing the onus of caching data during transmission processes to be distributed and shared by various computers within the cloud. As a result, customers receive a higher level of service than they would typically receive. In addition, a known advantage to accommodating high data throughput is to use computer chip cores, which communicate via networks rather than the conventional computer bus. Although technical, it’s the small tweaks that allow for huge improvements in system performance that make hosted service providers special. The cloud is maintained with state-of-the-art technologies, configurations, hardware, and software, and it is supported by knowledgeable support personnel.
I am a firm believer in the concept of “the perfect data warehousing solution” being achievable. DWaaS is high and exacting in its performance, scalability, usability, and flexibility as a data warehousing solution. It is a modernization innovation that provides all of the complexities and features of conventional data warehousing without the manual and time-consuming operational processes and high costs associated with hardware. From programmable clusters to multiplatform compatibility, DWaaS is true to form. It’s simply better.
Resources
Be sure to check out the article, Teradata Turns to the Cloud, Offers Data Warehouse as a Service, for more information on its data warehousing in the cloud solution.
Check out InfoWorld’s discussion in the article, Data Warehouse “as a Service”—A Good Pick for Mid-sized Companies.
Read 1010data Offers Data Warehouse-as-a-Service for Analytics Queries for a comprehensive view of DWaaS and its innovative features.
An interesting read on DWaaS is The Cloud Is Ready for Your Data Warehouse, Are You? by Enterprise Systems Media.