Data warehouses (DWH) have been imperative to analytical querying & reporting for decades. But they were not designed to tackle today’s exponential data growth.
Today, cloud data warehousing helps overcome physical data centers’ storage and resource constraints. And a cloud-based data warehouse can dynamically scale & shrink to meet your ever-changing user needs & business priorities! It is an excellent solution for enterprises that require the agility to store, process & manage massive amounts of data for analytics & BI applications.
This article aims to help you explore the basics of a cloud data warehouse, its key features, business benefits, reasons to move to a cloud data warehouse (DWH), major cloud data warehouse providers & how to choose the right one. So, let’s get started!
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It is a database delivered as a managed service in the public cloud and optimized for analytics, scale, and usability. Cloud-based data warehouses allow organizations to focus on running their businesses rather than driving a server room. The cloud’s scalability, usability & interoperability allow business intelligence teams to extract actionable insights for quick, data-driven decision-making.
For all cloud-based data warehouse solutions, the service vendor provides the following capabilities:
Traditional Data Warehouse refers to an on-premises DWH located or installed at the company’s office. And to facilitate this, organizations must invest in procuring physical hardware such as servers. And, to manage and update them, an organization would require a separate staff. Most importantly, scaling this warehouse takes time as new hardware would need shipping to the destination and installation.
As the name suggests, Cloud Data Warehouse is the DWH solution available on the cloud. The organizations don’t have to own and maintain hardware in this case. For cloud DWH, the updates, maintenance, and hardware scalability are managed by 3rd party cloud providers.
Let’s see how this integrated data management solution stacks up against an on-premises setup:
Parameter | On-premises DWH | Cloud DWH |
Scalability | Costly to scale and complex to scale down | Flexible that fluctuates in size & needs to upsize or downsize their storage space and tools |
Maintenance | Typically need ongoing maintenance for hardware and software, periodic upgrades, and new tools over time | Pay-as-you-go pricing model, you only spend on the storage space and cloud features you need |
Availability | Depends on the hardware & software quality and the competence of the in-house IT team. | Leading cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) ensure up to 99.99% of uptime |
Performance | Offers excellent performance that can be managed in milliseconds if the scalability challenge is solved | Can serve multiple geographic locations with excellent query-handling capability that can be measured in seconds |
Security | It largely depends on the competence of the in-house IT team | Ensured by the cloud provider to protect infrastructure and data safety. |
Cost-effectiveness | Requires significant initial investments (hardware, IT team, training & more) | Zero hardware-related costs with the possibility to pay as per the pay-as-you-go model |
Cloud computing data warehouse solutions support integration with on-premises data warehouses in hybrid setups. Cloud platforms facilitate integration with third-party tools and enable seamless connectivity between apps and devices.
A cloud DWH enables enterprises to adapt quickly to changing workloads and expand or reduce capacity in response to fluctuations in concurrent users. Additional benefits include:
If you’re interested in learning more about the cloud data warehouse market and its future potential, here’s a quick read with some important insights.
There are many cloud-based data warehouse solutions on the market, but the key features common to the most popular ones are as follows:
We can help you to design & implement a cloud-based data warehouse that meets your specific data storage needs & migration requirements.
The cloud data warehouse is a vital solution for modern BI & analytics, enabling businesses to leverage advanced analytics to extract insights for optimizing processes, improving customer service, and ultimately gaining a competitive edge. Modern cloud architectures combine the flexibility of the cloud, the agility of big data platforms & the power of data warehousing – at a fraction of the cost of on-premises solutions.
Below are the benefits in scalability, cost and performance when implementing a cloud data warehouse architecture:
Choosing the right cloud data warehouse provider and platform requires in-depth research and technical knowledge. To help you find the best fit for your business needs, we’ve curated this list of five popular cloud data warehouse-focused services offered by leading cloud vendors.
Key Features | Ideal For | Value Proposition | |
Azure Cosmos DB + Azure Synapse Analytics | – Flexible data storage – Compatible with columnar, key-value, graph & document data models – optimized for analytical querying – Automatic data deleted – Automatic indexing | – Enterprise teams that need to run no-ETL queries in real-time on high-volume operational datasets with zero impact on the performance of transactional workloads. | – Microservices within event-driven architectures – Near real-time analytics |
Snowflake | – SQL-based queries for analytics – Support for structured data as well as XML & JSON | – Businesses across verticals looking to allocate computation resources for loading & querying data concurrently across public cloud providers | – Supports multiple service connections and continuous data loading from Snowflake files stages, Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3 & Google Cloud Storage |
Amazon Redshift | – Automated infrastructure provisioning – Parallel processing capabilities – Network isolation security – Native spatial data processing capabilities | – Ideal for enterprises that have invested in AWS deployment and tools. | – Machine learning capabilities – Federated queries support – Integration with S3 cloud storage |
Azure SQL Database | – Dynamic scalability – Automated index management – Supports cross-database SQL queries – Always-on data encryption – Inbuilt backup | – The right choice for mid-sized data warehousing needs that go up to 8 TB of data volumes with up to 30,000 concurrent sessions | – An elastic pool of resources – A fully managed instance of SQL Server |
BigQuery | – Part of Google Cloud – Automated data loading and transformation – Streaming insertion API – Full SQL query support – Granular permissions | – Suitable for exabyte-scale storage with analytical queries that filter data according to clusters or partitions or need to scan the entire dataset. | – Integration with BigQuery ML |
As a cloud app development company, we offer full-cycle development services by leveraging platforms & services provided by popular cloud vendors, including Amazon AWS & Microsoft Azure.
Modern cloud data warehouse solutions help meet enterprise needs for big data processing, cloud computing & other data-driven initiatives. However, it would help if you considered the following factors to ensure that your chosen vendor meets your unique business needs:
You also need to assess your options in terms of practical use cases like:
Here’s an insightful read on DWH design & development with industry-wide use cases and cost considerations to help you make an informed decision.
The selection of the optimal data warehouse technology could be a daunting task. While leading cloud DWH providers offer similar functionality in terms of scalability, flexibility, reliability & security, you need the right development partner. They can help serve your varied use cases. If you are unsure either about your exact storage, processing, and analytics requirements or about the best-fitting cloud data warehouse platform, we can help.
Our dedicated data warehouse development services cover cloud DWH consulting, designing, quality assurance & implementation with migration & modernization assistance.
Learn how we helped a US-based hospitality giant streamline and manage their siloed data from 20+ sources and double their workflow efficiency.
Our client was using multiple applications to manage their disparate data sources and wanted us to create a centralized source of information.
We built a Cloud Data Warehouse (DWH) that unified all the data from their internal & third-party applications. The key deliverables of the project included the creation of
Benefits Delivered
With cloud DWH as the focal point of your modernization journey, you can streamline your processes with optimized query performance & productive integrations from siloed sources. They are a cost-effective and scalable solution for modern businesses as they offer the flexibility to query and analyze data from multiple sources. Further, they are easier to set up and maintain than traditional on-premises data warehouses. And if you are unsure of your storage, data management & analytics needs, we’re ready to help you!
We can help you implement a cloud DWH to meet your unique storage, integration, or migration needs for maximized performance.