Security is a big thing.
We always worry about security. And one of the primary security concerns is data, along with what happens to that data.
The big question then becomes whether the cloud is better for our data than what we can do with that data?
While there are many schools of thought that we can dig into, what’s important to remember is that the cloud gives us everything that we need from a compute perspective.
It comes with pre-built solutions and with a partner network that can support that.
With the cloud, we’re giving our data the best chance of survival, utilisation, and the ability to exploit it for the purpose of business growth.
So why is the cloud great for data? Here are 4 reasons why.
Sheer Capacity
From a consumer perspective, the capacity or space is theoretically unlimited.
If you need data in the cloud, it’s there. It’s the hyperscaler’s problem to make sure that there’s enough capacity. The consumer gets to use, use, use. Remember, you do pay for it, so don’t let it just go crazy.
But we do have unlimited amounts of storage capacity.
Not only do we have unlimited storage capacity, we have different classes of storage.
From my slow storage, for keeping data for very long periods of time that I don’t access frequently, to my lightning fast storage, which I pay more for, but the performance is amazing.
So we not only got capacity and volume, but we’ve got performance, which I can enable with the click of a button.
Security
The cloud has the biggest security gates.
They spend massive amounts of money, time, engineering, and research into making sure the cloud is secure.
And they’re not only making sure that the cloud is secure in the background, which means as a cloud engineer I can trust what they’re doing, but I can also dig into the cloud configuration options on my side and see that I have flexibility.
I can make it as unsecure or as highly secure as possible.
All my security dreams come true in the cloud because I’ve got more options than I’ve ever had.
As a consumer, or potentially just a business owner or someone that is looking at digital transformation, you just need to understand that at a base level, the hyperscalers are committed to protecting your data.
On top of that, the partner and the engineers that you hire to secure your cloud are also given the most options that they’ve ever had to secure your data.
So security is a massive aspect to making sure that our data is safe in the cloud and that it is safe.
Availability
With the cloud, I don’t have the problem of servers crashing or failing.
I have all the options at the click of a button. Once again, always remember that it will cost a little extra money, but you can make it available. And availability doesn’t mean having a cold copy that you can tap into in case the primary copy is not present.
Availability means you bring your data closer to your customers.
Your customers might be internal users that just need the data, so you can set up an office anywhere and make the data closely available to them, conveniently available to them, and get them working at pace and speed.
But it also means that you’ve got the assurance of your data being secured with the same mechanisms in multiple locations. You never have to worry about losing your data.
Once again, good design thinking and practice goes into this, but all the options are there.
The team running your technical capabilities have more options than ever before.
Options
I have now got options to visualise my data. Tools to make my data work for me.
Things that used to be done by data scientists are now becoming self-service BI options to the average user. This is what’s amazing about it.
And I’m not saying disregard data scientists. Data scientists are critical components for any organisation in this day and age.
But their work and the tools that the cloud offers us means improving your ability to serve your customer. You can visualise your data in multiple ways, you can look at this from different scenarios, you can do planning based on forecasting.
All these options that have never been available, or have been available at extreme costs, or only available to a select few within the business, are now readily usable.
So we have more options to visualise and use our data than ever before.
And that’s one of the biggest drawcards of the cloud. Because they’ve got the capacity and they’ve got the processing capability to overlay the solutions that they give us. Whether it be a self-service BI solution or just a visualisation tool – to overlay those two is magic.
It’s magic happening in the cloud, and it’s more accessible than ever before.
So data in your cloud data in the cloud is data is why the cloud reports that the computing, processing and metric is all accidental.
The cloud needs your data to really harness it, and you need your data in the cloud because you’re not using data effectively.
I can almost guarantee that.
Take Your Cloud Experience to the Next Level
The cloud offers unmatched safety, capacity, availability and so much more.
But knowing how to take full advantage of these hyperscalers is an entirely different ball-game. So much can go wrong in that space, that your next question becomes how to securely move to the cloud and ensure that your environment is optimised for cost and scale.
Our answer?
With certifications across GCP and AWS, our highly-qualified teams make your cloud journey a breeze.
