The world of enterprise BI has seen rapid growth in cloud adoption rates in recent years. The cloud data warehouse (CDW) now serves as the foundation of the data analytics architecture for many successful organizations.
Given that a traditional data warehousing architecture may not meet your modern data processing requirements, you should consider moving your data architecture to the cloud. Let’s find out more!
What is a Data Warehouse? Why is it Important?
A data warehouse is a repository of business data stored by organizations to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities. It is designed to aggregate data from disparate sources, making it easy to perform analytics and extract meaningful information.
Data warehouse allows managers and executives to retrieve data from multiple sources to facilitate their reporting and analyses activities. Having data in a single place helps analysts get a holistic view of data and obtain critical insights more efficiently. They can run ad-hoc queries to perform advanced and predictive analytics, ultimately leading to better business decisions.
There are two ways to deploy a new data warehouse, i.e., on-premises (on-prem) and cloud.
On-prem Data Warehouse
An on-prem data warehouse is located onsite. It requires extensive investment upfront and a team of IT professionals to develop and maintain. As a result, these deployments can be prohibitively expensive and inflexible. Moreover, they require constant additional investments to keep up with the growing volume, velocity, and variety of data and analytics demanded by modern organizations.
That being said, some organizations that have strict data governance and security policies in place might prefer an on-prem infrastructure to create and enforce customized rules and regulations.
Cloud Data Warehouse
A cloud data warehouse is a centralized data repository stored in the cloud. It is easier to set up than an on-prem data warehouse as it doesn’t require expensive hardware or time-consuming configuration and setup.
This built-in flexibility gives enterprises the ability to increase computing power and storage as needed. The rapid scalability of cloud platforms also allows them to handle the sheer volume and pace of data, enabling organizations to obtain data-driven strategic insights and facilitate faster, smarter decision-making.
A modern data warehouse architecture offers improved computational ability and higher accessibility, so analysts have a single source of truth to fuel their BI and analytics initiatives.
5 Reasons Why Cloud Data Warehouse is Preferred
The unique capabilities and benefits of a cloud data warehouse make it a preferred option for most organizations. Here are five reasons why moving data warehouse to the cloud can be a smart choice:
- Better Cost Savings
Unlike an on-prem data warehouse, a modern cloud-based data warehouse requires minimal to no upfront costs. It saves organizations from investing in costly IT infrastructure or hire a dedicated IT team to manage and maintain the system.
Affordability is among the top reasons many businesses move to a data warehouse in the cloud. Small and mid-sized organizations find a cloud-based data warehouse a more viable option as it requires fewer resources to maintain hardware, server rooms, networking, etc.
Even large enterprises have started moving data warehouses to the cloud to cut down operational costs. A cloud-based enterprise data warehouse ensures lower costs with elasticity and helps organizations keep up with their ever-expanding analytical needs.
You can opt for cost-effective data warehouse automation tools like Astera DW Builder that allows enterprises and organizations to design a robust data warehouse in the cloud to start realizing the cost-saving benefits.
- Improved Security
Data security is perhaps one of the biggest concerns for any organization. Moving a data warehouse to the cloud is a step in the right direction to maximize the security of sensitive business information. The lack of physical infrastructure onsite virtually (no pun intended) eliminates the risk of physical theft of the organization’s confidential data.
Furthermore, cloud-based data warehouse solutions have numerous internal controls and protocols to safeguard sensitive data. Advanced encryption and security tools protect business information from external threats like cyberattacks to ensure data protection.
- Enhanced Integration
According to Forbes, over 80% of enterprise Business Operations leaders find data integration critical to ongoing operations. With the influx of data in today’s digitized world, enterprises have shifted their focus on data integration to support analytics and BI initiatives.
That is where a modern cloud data warehouse can prove to be extremely valuable. It is compatible with third-party data integration tools that facilitate data integration processes, including cleansing, ETL mapping, and transformation. Overall, it offers enhanced integration compared to its on-prem counterpart.
Cloud data warehouses can easily integrate data from different sources, including other cloud platforms and semi-structured or unstructured inputs. Users can simply connect and configure the relevant source system and start modeling a data warehouse to meet their specific business needs.
- Greater Flexibility and Scalability
When comparing cloud architecture vs. traditional architecture, scalability is a crucial factor that tilts the scale in favor of a cloud-based data warehouse. Unlike on-prem data warehouses, a modern cloud data warehouse can accommodate large-scale growth without any hassle.
Therefore, cloud data warehouse migration can be highly beneficial, especially for enterprises that outgrow their storage and computational needs. They can simply upgrade their plan to add more resources to support their business growth — no capital investment is needed.
For instance, a startup may require more computational power for deeper analytics once the business matures. A cloud data warehouse can be used to independently scale compute and storage to upscale operations and support analytics and business intelligence.
Generally, data warehouses expand over time, so moving to the cloud is always a step in the right direction. It eliminates the need to buy and configuring additional storage hardware and expand network bandwidth for fast data retrieval.
Moreover, enterprises can not only scale up when there are surges of incoming data but also scale down whenever needed to save unnecessary costs.
- Rapid Accessibility and Availability
Organizations need accurate and timely information to make crucial business decisions. A traditional, on-prem data warehousing infrastructure with slow batch processing can cripple your reporting infrastructure with outdated insights. Moreover, traditional data warehouses are solely dependent on equipment and human resources. A small mechanical or system failure can lead to costly downtime.
On the other hand, cloud data warehouses are built to handle near real-time or streaming updates, enabling quick, timely analytics. The constant availability of the cloud means that these data insights are directly accessible to business users and always remain up to date.
Advanced features like automated load balancing allow organizations to process data more efficiently.
Build your Data Warehouse in the Cloud with Astera DW Builder
A cloud-based data warehouse can help store and process copious amounts of data to draw insights and make data-driven decisions. Advanced reporting and analytics capabilities of a modern cloud data warehouse can help improve your enterprise’s bottom line.
Therefore, moving your data warehouse to the cloud should be your preferred choice. The good news is that Astera Data Warehouse Builder can simplify and radically accelerate your cloud data warehouse migration.
Our end-to-end data warehouse automation solution ticks all the boxes, serving as a powerful tool to build a robust data warehouse for your enterprise. Some of the key qualities include:
- Built-in connectors to support integrations with leading databases, web applications, and cloud services providers, including Amazon, Azure cloud, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Vertica, Google Cloud, Salesforce, HubSpot, SAP Hana, and many others.
- Mature ETL and ELT engines capable of handling large workloads and ensuring optimal query performance.
- Schema-agnostic data modeling and codeless development capabilities, minimizing time-to-production of data warehouse dramatically.
- In-depth data model verification module to ensure error-free deployment of your dimensional models or data vaults.
- Unified metadata-driven architecture to integrate structured, semi-structured, and even unstructured data from multiple data sources.
- Role-based access control mechanism to define user roles at a granular level to grant and restrict access to different users for better data governance and security
With Astera DW Builder, you can build your cloud data warehouse in a matter of weeks rather than months.
Are you convinced of the benefits of cloud data analytics and want to design a modern data warehouse architecture for your organization? Contact our experts today or request a demo of Astera DW Builder to find out how you can build a data warehouse in just a few days!