A phenomena affecting predominantly some of middle-sized, well-established companies could easily be called “We can not afford diving into big data”. Often, this comes from our prospective clients, who are in favour of data solutions. Some even have attempted to apply one within their business already, but found it unrealistic at some point. Information technologies are developing extremely fast and what might have been too tricky yesterday might be solvable today. Let us talk two of the categories within “we can not afford”: financial resources and security.

Financial concerns

Yes, only a handful of years ago, having company data consolidated in a data warehouse meant always building and maintaining one. With all the associated costs, including, but not limited to:

• Premises for building a DWH,
• Cost of hardware and assembly + technical maintenance,
• Internal capabilities to maintain and manage.

With increased internet speed and Amazons` own demand for data storage, those so-often-mentioned cloud solutions became widely available. More on technicalities of cloud services in a later blog, but their rise managed to address exactly such concerns for many small, as well as big users.

Unless your company lists in the Fortune 500, you are likely going to significantly benefit from available pay-as-you-go pricing or yearly subscriptions. The flexibility when it comes to both storage size and compute power is what turns Amazon, Google, Snowflake and others into such a powerful tool. Specific costs estimates might be challenging to predict, but the possibility to optimize your services often within hours makes cloud such a good fit for many mid-sized applications.

Data floating in the sky

For all our customers data privacy and security is ranking high on their priority list. On ours as well. That is why we believe cloud storage is an answer for most use-cases: Unless an institution possesses a bottomless bucket allowing them to constantly throw resources on both hardware and people to keep their on-premise solution safe, chances are the solution will not keep up with the increasing complexity forever. At the same time, with all of the global providers you are able to choose from different locations to store your data. For many, this is an extremely efficient way to preempt risks of outage caused by malfunction or natural disasters.

To be fair, no solution is indeed bulletproof and even cloud services might be prone to breaches: Unlike in on-premise warehouses, the biggest vulnerability with cloud lies on human side. Even numerous levels of authentication might not be enough if handled without care. Yet, properly training the key users to understand and comply with some basic security rules enhances the security onto a next level. 

There are, undoubtedly, numerous other issues to address when deciding whether to make such a leap. We discussed the security and the impact on your bottom line because, at the end of the day, in all cases it comes down to these two criterias. We will be happy to share with you more in some upcoming blogs or personally.