With more than three quarters of companies making use of cloud computing, you’re probably no stranger to the idea of shifting business applications to the cloud. But one application you may not have considered migrating is your data warehouse.
As well as the financial benefits you should expect from any cloud migration project, moving to a cloud data warehouse will let you
- handle larger data volumes without worrying about scaling issues
- more quickly and easily tap into new data sources, including streaming data
- gain a better understanding of what data you hold in your organisation and be able to exploit more of it
- become a data-driven business, by making it easier for more people to access more data, using tools that allow them to easily explore and visualise it
- exploit advanced analytics such as predictive analytics, data mining and machine learning
- reduce the operational effort your running a data warehouse, freeing up your IT experts and data analysts to focus on solving business challenges rather than running infrastructure
- improve your data security and data governance
Of course, moving your data warehouse to the cloud is not without its challenges. Steps to a successful migration typically include:
- making your new cloud data warehouse part of a wider modernisation strategy for your business operations, data platforms, analytics and reporting
- creating an easily managed, multiphase project that allows you to prove technical elements while delivering immediate business value
- prioritising specific high-value use cases for the early phases —such as business analytics — to create user buy-in
- selecting projects that will drive business innovation, such as adding advanced analytics, easy-to-use self-service tools that allow ad hoc queries to be run quickly, o real-time reporting using ingestion tools that can handle streamed as well as batch data
- refocusing IT staff away from operations on higher value work such as data modelling, improving data quality and building pipelines and integrations to bring in more data.
To find out more about why you should run your data warehouse in the cloud — and best practices for how making the transition — download this e-book on Data Warehousing in the Cloud: Opportunities, Benefits and Best Practices, or come and talk to the data analytics experts in our GCP team.
