Cloud storage is growing in popularity-and for good reason. These modern storage facilities offer a number of advantages over traditional on-premises versions. Here are the top seven benefits of cloud storage.
- Fast deployment. With a few clicks of the mouse, cloud storage allows you to acquire virtually unlimited processing power and memory, and create your own data storage, data marts and isolated environments from anywhere in minutes.
- Low total cost of ownership (TCO). Data warehouse-as-a-service (DWaaS) pricing models are designed so that you pay only for the resources you need, and only when you need them. You don’t have to forecast your long-term needs or pay for more computing resources over the course of the year than you need. You can avoid upfront costs such as expensive equipment, server rooms and maintenance staff. Separating data storage prices from compute prices also gives you the opportunity to reduce costs.
- Elasticity. Cloud storage allows you to dynamically scale up and down as needed. The cloud provides a virtualized and highly distributed environment capable of managing vast amounts of data that can scale up and down.
- Security and disaster recovery. In many cases, cloud data storage provides better data security and encryption than on-premises storage. Automatic data backup and redundancy minimize the risk of data loss.
- Real-time technologies. Cloud data warehouses built on in-memory database technology can provide extremely fast data processing speeds, enabling real-time data for instant situational awareness.
- New technologies. Cloud data warehouses make it easy to integrate new technologies, such as machine learning, that can provide business users with guided experiences and decision support – such as recommended questions to ask.
- Empowering business users. Cloud data warehouses empower employees equally and globally by providing a single view of data from a variety of sources and an extensive set of tools and features that make data analysis tasks easy. They can connect new applications and data sources without involving IT.