Are You Afraid to “Lift the Lid” On Cloud Technology?

The Opening of the Box

As was the case with Pandora’s box, once the lid is opened on cloud technology and you realize that perhaps the shiny new object interior didn’t provide what you expected from your investment in the technology, it may be too late to change directions. So is the case with many new and evolving data warehouse cloud technologies that support critical business analytics and cloud migrations.

Lessons Learned in New Technology Boxes

Based on my 25+ years’ experience helping many, many companies to explore, evaluate, adopt and integrate new technologies, the latest data warehouse cloud environments that have become a de facto standard today, ain’t what they are cut out to be.  Before you lift the lid, explore it in much greater detail before you buy. Too often, as technology or business leaders, we rush to take the advice of sales leads to adopting the new brightest shiny object that is just different from what we have today. Because we don’t know how the technology will perform or how much it will cost over the long term, we rush into a purchase. Then, unless the technology can be swapped out with minimal cost and effort, we are stuck with it.

Test Drive and Extrapolate

Most of us don’t buy cars without some form of a test drive and having a certified mechanic “lift the lid” and ensure that our purchase will support our short-term and long term transportation needs. With data warehouse cloud technology, beyond the usual proof of concept (POC) that is typically limited in scope and scale, that isn’t always possible. So, what do you do? Challenge the data warehouse as a service vendor’s technology and ‘lift the lid’ to better understand the real performance and costs, at scale. Not the scale that the prospective vendor may offer for a POC,  but that which would be more representative of your business growth needs. Also, do some of your own extrapolated models using the vendor’s own pricing and performance models to see if they stack up.

Do Your Homework

An increasing number of companies are realizing that the cloud data warehouse technology they have adopted, performs great at entry scale, but once their analytics needs dramatically increase with more data, more concurrent users, (data scientists, business analysts, real-time decision making and connected data sources), the performance drops off significantly, and the cost runs up exponentially. Before buying, do your homework and ‘lift the lid’ on any cloud-based data warehouse technology. Ask hard questions and model your needs at scale. You don’t want to get stuck with a Pandora’s box of high costs and lower performance! We are happy to answer any of your hard questions, why not “lift the lid” on the hybrid cloud data warehouse and see how it compares to our competitors?

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. We deliver cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data solutions that simplify how people connect, manage, and analyze data. We transform business by enabling customers to make confident, data-driven decisions that accelerate their organization’s growth. Our data platform integrates seamlessly, performs reliably, and delivers at industry-leading speeds.