Choosing the Right Cloud Platform for the Business

By CIOReview | Tuesday, August 22, 2017
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Big Data is the newest means of gaining insights and surviving in the competitive market. But comparing big data solutions and choosing the best one is not a trivial task. While in the process of comparison of big data solutions, one must first realize the importance of it, regardless of any type of business. On the top of it, for living in a global economy, one needs a metrics-driven competitor. For those who are new into the cloud technology, figuring out the best solution for the business in a crowded cloud market can be very challenging.

Assessing your cloud needs or realizing which cloud your business should rely on, whether it is private or public or a hybrid is one of the very first steps in determining the ideal services.  The second step may focus on what type of data one needs to store in the cloud, the information that one collects may largely influence the choice of your cloud service. If the information is sensitive and needs to be secure, then a private cloud will cater to the needs of your business. But if there is no outside value to the business data, then a public cloud would suffice. After assessing the type of information one must choose the right software depending on the industry or the business, the software may either be stored in the public or private or a hybrid cloud.

Let’s analyze different types of data bases a company can choose from, that are based on the models of big data, each of them being with a different set of features. The database model that the company chooses largely depends on the type of data the businesses want to collect and analyze. One of the most common models that businesses use is SQL RDBMS which is used to store business transactions. Database architects and programmers are mostly aware of working with SQL RDBMS because it handles structured data in the fixed fields. The unstructured data, on the other hand, requires a different model. For example, Hadoop is used for unstructured data, with no defined structure, and for case analysis. If the data is stored on any specific thing, then NoSQL is generally the model to choose.  Both Hadoop and NoSQL are not the most common database models; they have been gaining attention lately as the organizations are figuring out the best way to manage unstructured data.

All these decisions are influenced by the actual needs of the business; a database model that will not work well with the data that has been collected will most likely fail to deliver effective results over a certain period of time. Also, if the cloud provider is not offering the right features that meet business needs will hamper the progress.

If one cannot get a public cloud big data service, they still have the choice of hosting their own big data application in the cloud using an infrastructure that is on public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and big data software that the one has selected. A do-it-yourself approach may call for advantages even if users have selected big data services. Firstly, there are a lot of options for cloud hosting because all cloud providers do not support big data as a service. Secondly, users can use multiple public clouds or switch between varied cloud service providers. Thirdly, one can also go for hybrid big data applications if they adapt to the same big data software in on-premise or in the cloud.   

With cloud big data having a considerable variable, one has to be prepared for gathering huge amount of operating data on quality of the experience to ensure workers are getting exactly what they need. Otherwise, one may end up choosing something that is too costly to fix and very slow to accept.

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