Big data and the Cloud have been the talk of the business world lately, and with good cause. Big data offers sharper, better insights into customer behaviors and desires, with the potential for greater profits and a competitive edge. The Cloud offers the chance to cut IT costs in return for a light, scalable system that is highly adaptable and solutions that are perfect for collaboration and telecommuting.
So what happens when you mix big data with the cloud? What are the benefits and which companies are already offering services that businesses can make use of?
Cloud Options for Easier Big Data Adoption
One of the bonuses of the Cloud is that a business can choose their Cloud provider, sign up, and enjoy the benefits of the Cloud without too steep a learning curve. Someone else takes care of the actual running of the Cloud service so there’s no need to invest a lot in training, for example. The same is true of Cloud-based big data options.
Take data processing software Hadoop.
Most people getting into big data look into using Hadoop at some point. By choosing a Cloud-based service that runs Hadoop, businesses can take advantage of the expertise and infrastructure of the Cloud provider, reducing the amount of hands-on application wrangling they need to do to make Hadoop work for them.
Providers already offering Hadoop-based solutions in the Cloud include Qubole, Rackspace, VMWare, and Amazon Elastic Mapreduce.
Cloud Makes Big Data Scalable
One of the benefits of the Cloud for businesses is its scalability.
Instead of making a huge investment in infrastructure and tools such as servers and software licenses, businesses can take advantage of the flexible nature of the Cloud to scale the service up and down to suit their business as it grows and changes.
When it comes to figuring out how to unlock big data’s potential, the Cloud gives businesses the chance to start small and grow into big data at their own pace.
Businesses can start with a comfortably sized investment in a Cloud-based big data service and gradually scale it up if they start seeing the kind of results they want from gathering and analyzing big data.
Big Data Goes Real-Time In the Cloud
As big data becomes well-known and more businesses adopt it, new ways of using big data are coming to the fore.
For some businesses, that means not only analyzing data that has been collected in the past, but harvesting and analyzing big data as its being generated, such as data from social media.
For companies who could benefit from getting their hands on data as it appears, Cloud-based solutions could be the answer.
Take for example Amazon’s Kinesis, a fully managed service designed to process and stream data in quantities up to hundreds of terabytes per hour.
Users can build dashboards to analyze the incoming data, and the service is scalable, meaning businesses only pay for what they need.
With Google also recently scaling up its Cloud-based data analytics tool, BigQuery, to handle larger data sets in real time, analyzing real time big data in the Cloud is becoming a real possibility.
Cloud-based big data solutions give businesses a flexible way to handle big data that is low on stress and complicated systems and big on scalability and ease of use.
No matter where a business is in their big data journey, the Cloud is a valuable tool to help them manage the data and use it to improve their business and better understand their customers.
About the Author: Tristan Anwyn is an author who writes on subjects as diverse as health, marketing, business, and SEO.
