Data warehouses are moving to the cloud at an increasing pace. Each year the technology gets better and better and the costs become more affordable. Form a long-time “you’ll never get me to run my warehouse in the cloud” person, I will explain to you why you want to move your data warehouse to the cloud and how a successfully transition your warehouse to the cloud will save your company money and provide you with peace of mind.
Why do you want to move your data warehouse to the cloud? Here are five reasons to move to the cloud:
- The first benefit of data warehousing in the cloud in the elasticity of the cloud. Imagine being able to dynamically scale your infrastructure to meet your computing needs for special processing. Quarterly and EOY processing is handled with a couple of clicks to scale up and once the processing is complete you can scale back down. No need to go through a long procurement process and have servers sitting with unused CPU and memory. The cloud offers you the ability to quickly and easily increase and decrease disk space, CPU, and memory resources to accommodate these temporary spikes in your warehouse usage.
- The next benefit is cost savings. Who doesn’t like to save money? Having a lot of unused disks, CPU, and memory sitting around for 20 hours per day doing little to nothing, waiting for the nightly batch processing is an enormous waste of resources. Pay for only what you need, when you need it is what makes moving to the cloud so enticing for most executives. But many Data Architects and Directors can get a nice bonus on the cost savings as well.
- Although you may have an amazing in-house IT team, they are no match for the security of today’s cloud. Today’s cloud providers whole business relies on security and they employ thousands of highly talented security engineers to implement security patches and research and resolve potential issues every moment of every day. Their reputation and overall success depend on the security of the services they are providing.
- Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity is a breeze with a cloud provider. You can easily implement a multi-region solution, ensuring that your application is up and available 24 X 7 X 365.
- Ease of use. Today’s cloud architectures provide you with an easy to use interface and transition plan. There are some cloud data warehouse vendors that provide curated datasets for you to use, just retrieve and use in your data model. Extending your data warehouse was never so easy. With this data, you can find new insights and opportunities for your business.
I know, you’re sold! But where do you start? Do you create an AWS, Azure, Google BigQuery, or Snowflake account right away? How do you choose which cloud solution is best for your requirements? Come back in two weeks and read my next blog Choosing a Cloud Data Warehouse Solution.