Why Cloud Data Platforms are the new Eldorado for enterprises?

18 Feb 2023

We all know that the amount of data in today’s world is getting massive and that data is an asset for every company in their business model to ensure competitiveness, improve their service offers and make better insight-driven decision. In this new paradigm, we can see the big trend of Cloud Data Platform exploding this year, among the different players we can identify BigQuery on Google Cloud Platform, Redshift on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure Microsoft Synapse and Snowflake together with the surrounding ecosystems of services and tooling. But why exactly the Cloud Data Platforms are popular for business? What are their true advantages for companies? Which service provider and hyperscaler is the best for your needs?

We see a big evolution recently in the database landscape as more and more databases are deployed in the Cloud as native cloud databases. A recent study from IDC shows that most enterprises will accelerate their shift to a cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services by the end of 2021. But what does that involve?

What does it mean for a company to be in the Cloud?

In a nutshell, being in the cloud allows for companies to have a connected data ecosystem to share and collect data and also to provide new services which needs very large infrastructure. Modern Cloud Data Platform allows a centralization of data and data services.

Before going further, there is an important distinction to make to understand the Cloud Data Platform as a Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Cloud computing is composed of different services:

IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service: is when you are using an infrastructure coming from external provider (private or public).
SaaS, Software as a Service: are software like Salesforce, Dynamics, available on the cloud platform. This service is not the best for Company Data Platform as they cannot own their dashboard uses cases.
PaaS, Platform as a Service: It offers at a same time the infrastructure from an external provider and a software platform to collect data (like software to make calculation or to apply transformation). It’s important to understand we are at the point we do not only take infrastructure but infrastructure with new software.

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Cloud Data Platforms: a game changer in the market

Cloud Data Platforms are a game changer for companies in terms of flexibility & agility, they have competitive advantages as presented below.

Quick, easy & agile deployment
IT Costs reduction: Moving to the Cloud computing allows to decrease the maintenance costs, lowering the cost of hardware, software and services related.
On demand and auto-scalability: You can scale up or scale down your solutions needs to suit your business current situation. Your cloud computer service provider can manage this for you easily: total peace of mind!
Benefits from Cloud Security Compliancy: you automatically meet the core security and compliance requirements (such as data locality, protection and confidentiality) when migrating to a Cloud Data Platform
Connection with a large ecosystem of data sources and tools: You can easily make accessible your data and workload to your business users faster
Unlock advanced analytics: You can process large volume of data in an efficient way

Addressing all type of use cases regardless of their complexity

Cloud Data Platforms can support many new use cases that were previously not possible with traditional Data Warehouses. Allow me to share with you in this blog article two example of use cases we experienced:

In the first one, our client is moving to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Cloud. They would like to replace its legacy Data Warehouse, which does not fit with their needs anymore. After a data roadmap and a PoC phase, the modern data platform could be implemented allowing the customer to use it as a self-service and for a top-notch data management.

In the second project, the customer needed Analytics and DataViz using large volumes of real-time data. After a full data roadmap and a PoC, the client was able to have a modern Analytics platform implemented covering all the current use cases and reducing considerably the time to value for its future ones.

When the time comes to design their own Data platform, companies often ask which cloud service provider is the best to answer their needs. Although the trends show some leader in the market, we can easily get lost among the different major Cloud Data Platforms providers existing such as: AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure

Each cloud provider got its own specificities and the one you must select only depends on your companies‘ specific needs and situation.

To help you at this stage, you can ask yourself the following questions for your selection: