Cloud technology has evolved to a point of reliability and efficiency that there is a growing number of organizations that have begun to (if not already done so at this point) transition much of their processes over to the cloud as well as utilizing cloud-based applications to replace their on-premise software and radically transforming business processes. And data storage and organization that the data warehouse traditionally fulfills are among the areas that the cloud is transforming in more ways than one.
How the Cloud is Transforming the Data Warehouse
Thanks to cloud technology, the different tools and solutions that have been developed in recent years are able to deliver on-demand computing power and resources swiftly. This has allowed businesses to reduce or even do away with their need to buy, install, and maintain new and expensive physical hardware and infrastructure.
This puts the data warehouse in a unique situation. On one hand, many data warehouses were built on architectures that are now deemed obsolete with the emergence of newer and more improved cloud-based architectures.
While it might seem to be a no-brainer to upgrade the architecture of a data warehouse, this is not as easy as it may appear to be. For one, the traditional data warehouse architecture is designed specifically for an on-premise environment. As such, making a switch would not only be costly but also heavily disrupt their operations which would be detrimental to their business. And even if there is a way to minimize the disruption a transition like this could bring about, there is also the matter of cost as many organizations do not have the resources needed for such an endeavor.
The Hybrid Cloud for the Data Warehouse
With these considerations in mind, hybrid cloud systems that combine cloud and on-premise technologies have been developed, providing greater software-as-a-service application flexibility, increased cost savings, greater processing efficiency and storage capabilities, and broader options for governance and privacy.
The hybrid cloud offers key benefits that include:
Scalability and upgradability – The hybrid cloud not only can fit the changing needs of the organization but also deliver newer technologies in the data warehouse that not only offer higher performance but also allow for other data warehouse platforms to suit the organization’s needs such as a self-service data warehouse.
Flexible data storage management - The hybrid cloud offers a more flexible storage framework that can facilitate improved decision-making by allowing organizations to create a unified data lake where all their structured and unstructured data are stored alongside a distributed data warehouse implementation. This approach allows access to more insights and information through streamlined access and administration of their overall data and pools critical business data together, regardless of where it is physically stored, delivering unified data management.
Improving business outcomes - With the hybrid cloud enabling organizations to access power, performance, storage, and networking resources in a flexible manner, organizations can react more quickly to growth opportunities and improve business outcomes. Such flexibility also allows it to balance and optimize its on-premises and public cloud data resources. Workloads and data can be distributed across public cloud platforms, allowing for more choice based on both IT operational and business priorities.
Minimal disruptions – The hybrid cloud keeps organizations protected against downtime and data loss related to data center disruptions as well as from non-data center sources by improving their load-balancing and distribution of their critical operations during troubleshooting cycles.
Hybrid Cloud Challenges and Opportunities
Combining traditional and modern elements in a system is bound to create certain challenges. And the hybrid cloud is no stranger to them. For one, legacy data warehouses frequently lack granular control over resources allocated to jobs and tasks as well as the ability to support multiple versions of tools and engines. This defeats the flexibility promise as users are required to use the same versions of query engines and tools and it muddles operations and the upgrade process and can suppress innovation, especially across hybrid cloud environments.
There is also the increased need to distribute and spread data across different data centers and cloud networks to meet the expanding demands of storing and managing increasing amounts of data. With more data now created and originating outside data centers, they are finding overall data administration more complex and creating new cost containment, performance, and integration challenges.
Amidst these challenges, current trends in the hybrid cloud may help address these challenges as well as face future challenges head-on. In particular, having a hybrid cloud strategy that is increasingly aligned with a broader adoption of multi-cloud, analytics, and AI would help organizations as they ramp up their hybrid cloud.
The adoption of diverse data platforms is another emerging trend that can help organizations in addressing the diversity and complexity of modern data. The extended software portfolio of such platforms puts them in a much better position to put the right data on the right platform in the right conditions.
The incentives to modernize the data warehouse are huge and beneficial that ignoring such would put the business at risk of being left behind in the fast-evolving data management environment by bringing both essential services together for customers, the hybrid cloud is solidly positioned to deliver flexibility, cost savings, security, and on-demand compute power needed by today’s IT organizations.
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