The combination of big data and public cloud computing are taking the business IT world by storm. While both these technologies are useful for organizations, united in joint effort, they can bring your business IT proficiency and operations to a whole new level.
In and by themselves, public cloud computing and big data are valuable and beneficial technologies you can leverage to sharpen your business’ competitive edge. The former enables you to store and access data, software and other applications online instead of a physical computer infrastructure. The latter is a solution that allows you to manage large amounts of incoming data and run it through analysis to gain insights for better business decisions.
By combining public cloud computing and big data, more and more enterprises, both big and small, are looking to the cloud as the main delivery system from which to analyze big data.
What you get
The benefits and advantages of this big data and public cloud computing partnership are as follows:
- You reduce your IT costs –big data systems can be expensive to incorporate and implement into your business because of the kind of infrastructure they require. Throwing in cloud computing can reduce the costs by allowing you to acquire information on demand, as well as enough storage space to undertake data analytical tasks and other big data projects using software and applications stored in the cloud.
- You can combine internal and external data sources – companies, big and small, both have internal and external sources of data. While the more sensitive and critical information may be stored in-house, it makes more sense to analyze bigger chunks of data where it is stored on the public cloud, complete with its slew of on-demand apps and software, instead of utilizing a huge amount of resources to move extremely large amounts of data inside your firewall.
- You reduce your overhead consumption – instead of housing internal data on an expensive IT infrastructure that runs up a considerable amount in energy bills, cloud computing can automate all the processes you need to store your information in the cloud, analyze it there, in effect improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT team.
- You increase your IT flexibility – when you undertake big data analysis, particularly if your business belongs to the science and technology industry, you’ll find that you’ll require huge amounts of computing power during the extent of the analysis time. If you undertake your analysis using in-house servers, then they’ll need to be at one hundred percent functionality during the period of analysis, which will most likely shut most of your other business systems down. Performing your big data analysis in the cloud will allow you instant provisioning without compromising your other business processes. This gives you instant IT flexibility at less the cost.
- You get the support you need when you need it – analyzing big data will require you to install additional software and hardware, as well as train your IT team to acquire the skills to operate the new system. By integrating your data into the public cloud, you get the comprehensive help and support of the vendor – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Keeping into consideration several privacy issues, you can opt for a public cloud with its pay-per-use structure for less sensitive data, a private cloud to store your more critical information, or even a hybrid option of both public and private cloud storage.
Whichever choice of big data and cloud computing integration you opt for, this marriage of technologies will expedite your business processes, save you a great deal on resources and finances and give you the competitive advantage you need for your business.
Photo courtesy of Wired.
