Must-Have Features of a Hybrid Cloud Data Warehouse

Are you considering a hybrid cloud data warehouse for your company? Do you know what features to look for? If you want to maximize the value of this important infrastructure investment and give yourself the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs in the future, you need not just pick any solution; you need to pick the right solution to meet your business needs. Here is a list of the top must-have features of a hybrid cloud data warehouse solution.

Security

This should go without saying – your data warehouse stores a lot of valuable and sensitive information about your company, your products, your customers, and your operations. Because a hybrid cloud data warehouse is hosted outside of your company’s physical data centers, you need to be confident that the solution you choose has robust security features to safeguard your company’s data. Actian Data Platform has achieved SOC 2 Type 1 (a standards-based audit of system compliance) and utilizes SSL Encryption, Data Masking, and allows access only to whitelisted clients.

Multi-Cloud Deployment

Public and private cloud offerings in the marketplace are continuously changing, and your company’s preference of cloud providers is likely to shift over time based on cost, performance, and risk factors. Your hybrid cloud data warehouse should support multi-cloud deployment. This means it can both operate in different cloud environments and span across them. Many companies are adopting multi-cloud deployments, stratifying data across Azure, and AWS environments. This adds one more layer of redundancy to protect the company against business disruption and enables cloud costs to be optimized. This multi-platform approach also protects organizations from vendor lock-in.

Hybrid

Very few companies are ready to make the shift to “cloud-only” IT environments. You will need a “hybrid” data warehouse solution to optimize workloads across different public cloud environments and to enable highly sensitive business data to be stored in an on-premises or private cloud environment. Actian Data Platform, in addition to being a high-performance cloud data warehouse, also runs on-premises with federated query capability – giving you a choice about where to store your data while still leveraging cloud processing power for running queries.

Integrated Connectivity

Pre-built data integration and connectors to major commercial SaaS offerings can significantly reduce implementation costs and time to value for your hybrid cloud data warehouse. Most companies are moving away from home-grown IT systems towards 3^rd party offerings such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, NetSuite, etc. This strategy makes even more sense if you can easily plug the operational data sources into your hybrid cloud data warehouse.

Scalability

The reason you are implementing a data warehouse is that you have a lot of data and want to use it to drive business value. Actian Data Platform can scale to hundreds of users and hundreds of Terabytes of data. This scalability means that you have plenty of room to grow and expand how you use your data in support of digital transformation, data-driven decision making, and real-time operational analytics without worrying about performance issues.

Decoupled Storage and Compute

The storage and compute capacity needs of your hybrid cloud data warehouse aren’t equal. Storage needs grow incrementally over time as you produce more data.  Compute needs are variable based on your business activities. To learn more about this topic, check out a related blog, “Put the Analytics Compute Where the Data Lies.” You need to be able to size storage and compute capacity independently to suit workload volume, performance demands, variable usage, and avoid the cost burden of under-utilized capacity.

Ability to Suspend Compute

Do all your business applications really run 24×7? Most don’t. Even if you have a global business, you probably have reduced or no business activity on the weekends and during other periods of the year. Actian Data Platform enables you to suspend compute activities (effectively turning the system off) when you aren’t using it while maintaining the database, and you are ready to get moving again when business activities resume. This is an important feature for cloud cost optimization – you only pay when you are using the data warehouse service.

These are the “must-have features” of a data warehouse solution. Actian Data Platform supports each of these and a whole lot more.

To discover how Actian can help your company deliver high-value data management solutions, visit https://www.actian.com/data-platform

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.