Moving Your Data Warehouse to a Modern Cloud Data Platform
Teresa Wingfield
December 5, 2022
Do you still have an on-premises data warehouse? If so, are you evaluating whether you should move it to a cloud data platform? There are two main things to consider when making this decision: the advantages of the cloud versus on-premises deployment and the advantages of a modern cloud data platform versus an on-premises data warehouse.
Cloud Modernization
Regarding cloud deployments, I enthusiastically agree with David Linthicum’s statement that the industry has oversold and overstated cloud cost savings. David is a noted cloud expert and is the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting. I recommend that you read his InfoWorld Article, Was moving to cloud a mistake, to get some great advice on how to improve cloud return on investment (ROI).
I have also written a blog post called Will Cloud Data Warehouses Really Help You Cut Costs? In this post, I discuss why asking how much money you will save by moving your on-premises solution to the cloud may be the wrong question. Instead, you should be looking at cloud deployment benefits such as greater agility, accelerating innovation, ensuring availability, expanding reach, and more.
Data Platform Modernization
The Actian Data Platform makes it easy for businesses to connect, manage, and analyze their data in the cloud and on-premises if this is still needed for certain use cases. The table below highlights some of the main advantages that the Actian Data Platform offers versus what’s typically available in a traditional on-premises data warehouse.
| Actian Data Platform | Typical On-Premises Data Warehouse | |
| Solution Breadth | One solution for data integration, data management and data analytics lowers risk, cost, and complexity while allowing easier sharing and reuse across projects. | Cobbled together solutions from different vendors are complex, time consuming, and costly and make sharing and reuse difficult. |
| Scalability | Cloud elasticity provides the ability to quickly shrink or grow CPU capacity, memory, and storage resources.
Composable infrastructure and analytics make data readily shareable across use cases. Management, governance, and compliance controls are consistent. |
Overprovisioning is required to accommodate peak demand.
Rigid systems make it hard to share data. Controls across data are weak and inconsistent. |
| Timeliness | Real-Time data empowers “next best action” decisions in the moment. | Historical data with weeks to respond to requests for the right data. |
| Data Security + Data Privacy | Data security and data privacy using fine-grained techniques such as column-level de-identification and dynamic data masking. These prevent inappropriate access to personally identifiable information, sensitive personal information, and sensitive data. | Data security focus with limited support for data privacy. |
| Data in Context | Real-time analytics is embedded within the environment users operate in for instant accessibility. | Users need to leave their workflow to look at data analytics in a separate set of tools which slows decision making. |
| Data Democratization | Technical and business users with no IT involvement. Broad use by front-line workers across finance, sales and marketing, supply chain, customer service, customer success, healthcare, spend management, fraud, and risk management. | Technically savvy data engineers, data scientists and analysts representing a small percentage of an organization’s employees. |
Accelerate Modernization with the Actian Data Platform
The Actian Data Platform is trusted, flexible, and easy to use. These six features illustrate what ambitious businesses like yours can do to help modernize your on-premises data warehouse:
Quick Ingestion: A single user interface for self-service integration, analytics, and management. This enables anyone to be a data practitioner and helps build a data driven culture.
Superior Price Performance: Built to maximize resource utilization delivering unmatched performance and an unbeatable total cost of ownership.
REAL Real-Time: Patented technology allows real-time data updates without impacting query performance and costs. This enables data consumers to analyze always up-to-date data.
Single Platform: One solution for integration, management and analytics lowers risk, cost, and complexity while making sharing and reuse across projects easy.
Flexible Anywhere Deployment: Any cloud, hybrid, and on-premises – plus it is API-driven to embed analytics within applications and systems so that relevant data is delivered in context.
Role-Based Security Policies: Reduce the time and effort to comply with data and privacy regulations without compromising the usefulness of data to intended consumers.
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