Cloud Data Management Benefits, Strategies and Risks
Data is the lifeblood of every organization. It enables timely and historical decision support for the organization, its people, and customers. The value of data management cannot be underestimated. Organizations have to separate the concept of master data from general data for efficiencies with cloud data management. Careful selection of a data management platform and a data management system must be made with due diligence. Enter the power of Cloud Data Management.
Cloud Data Management should become a best practice in your organization for storing, managing, securing, and governing your mission-critical data. Cloud data management is basically managing data across cloud platforms and can include a heterogeneous approach to leverage on-premises data. Cloud Based Data Management services should be seen in your organization as a critical business capability for competitiveness, innovation, and sustainability. The entire organization should adhere to an overall Enterprise Cloud Data Management approach and strategy. Enterprise strategies should include a combination of technologies for business success. Cloud Management Platforms like those offered by Morpheus Data and VMware vRealize can improve automations and backup services such as Ruberik Cloud and Veeam can provide critical disaster recovery ensuring business continuity.
Benefits of Cloud Data Management
Cloud Data Management enables effective and efficient management of the data pipeline, including data integration, data quality, and metadata management. Data gets transformed into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom or decision support for the organization. This begins with quick and rapid data collection and discovery from any source, followed by data processing, analytics, and interpretation of data into information for people and applications. Then with continued data engineering for knowledge and decision support for effective business outcomes.
Many organizations experience an improvement in Big Data Management using the cloud. Data is constantly growing and has to be managed. Management of this data is relative to current and new growth opportunities for the organization. With so much data being collected about services, customers, suppliers, experiences, and other areas, the cloud, with its ability to be on-demand, scalable, and have rapid elasticity, makes it the ideal place for Big Data Management.
Improvements in Research Data Management are possible using cloud data management capabilities. During a research exercise, tons of data can be accessed and also created to support the research. This data after the research is not discarded but kept for historical purposes and continued refinement of the research approach and strategy. Cloud Data Management services can be of great help here, including enabling collaboration with other teams inside and outside of the organization.
Improvement in MDM, Master Data Management solutions between IT and the business has always been a challenge. There have been various technologies to discover and create a single source of truth for usage across the organization. Such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Configuration Management Databases (CMDB), and other Database Management Systems (DBMS) to help connect the organization as a single team. Cloud Data Management can be the foundation of a solution that ties the organization together. The advantages of the database approach and the benefits of Master Data Management strategy improvements have been known for years, now apply this knowledge to the cloud.
Improvement of the Data Management Platform begins with having a platform that allows interconnectivity anywhere and at any time. Your platform depending on your business, should enable other data management systems to work together for the organization’s good. Health data management, research data management, big data management, customer data management, product data management should have a point of integration to support enterprise data management. When architected for business purposes instead of a silo purpose, Cloud Data Management can be very beneficial for the organization.
Organizations can realize an improvement in overall data management for security, governance, and compliance for your organization with Cloud Data Management. Cloud providers’ full-time job is to manage the security of your data and applications, usually at lower costs than you can do so in your organization, especially for government regulations. When security management is improved, usually so does the ability to govern data usage, manage for compliance and risk for your organization.
The organization and its customers can improve mobility and increase mobile access to data for applications with Cloud Data Management solutions. Smartphones, mobile devices, sensors, and other devices can take advantage of giving and receiving data to the cloud. Data can always be available and accessible to enable business outcomes and great experiences.
Flexibility to focus on other business demands besides on-premises infrastructure challenges is one of the many reason’s organizations choose to use cloud-based resources, especially Cloud Data Management capabilities. This allows the organization not to build commoditized capabilities available in the cloud and focus on running the business instead of running information technology. For businesses, value cannot underestimate the benefits of a database management system in the cloud.
Organizations can manage disaster recovery in the cloud for data better than an on-premises solution, especially with a multi-cloud disaster recovery strategy. No organization wants to become optional because they cannot deliver services to their customers when needed because of unplanned downtime or issues such as denial of service. Disaster recovery management in the cloud with Cloud Data Management solutions can help organizations avoid these risks or mitigate the risks.
Strategy
Strategy, tactics, and operational plans have to be made for Cloud Data Management. It is not good enough to have a perceived operations plan for the management of database management systems without the organization’s strategic intent. Cloud Data Management is an enterprise concern and should be considered the foundation of the organization’s strategy, especially the specific cloud strategy. Today, every organization should have a cloud strategy, including a cloud data management strategy to support business efficiencies and business economics.
Cloud data management strategy should be a key component in risk management for the organization. There are mission-critical services that have to be delivered by an organization. These services need to differentiate from non-mission-critical services to enable an overall strategy for business continuity. Organizations should do risk planning, risk and impact analysis and create continuity plans enabled with cloud technology as a strategy with strategic plans developed and tested.
There should be a cloud migration strategy to support the organization’s risk tolerance for cloud technologies. Applications and data need to be audited to determine the current state of the application and data. Highlight any improvements that need to be done for improving the value of the migration to the cloud. Make the improvements, then migrate. Do not move apparent problems to the cloud platform, including data issues.
An overall cloud strategy should include an understanding of improvements to be gained. Some potential improvements are improved efficiencies in data management, greater customer insights for sales and marketing, improved performance, and acceleration of workload migrations to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. A Hybrid cloud strategy should be considered when storing and processing sensitive data. Compliance and regulatory requirements will drive the need for a higher level of security such as data encryption, data transition from rest, transit, and in use. As with any strategy, be sure to focus on strengths, opportunities, weakness, and threat (SWOT) analysis to help create the solution approach and strategic plan creation to support tactics and overall operations of the organization.
Future of Cloud Data Management
The maturity of Cloud Data Management solutions and the future of Cloud Computing will continue because of the importance of data to the organization for decision support. Organizations are built upon their data. The management of this will affect everything in the organization.
A few areas to understand and watch out for innovations and the reliance on Cloud Data Management are:
- Improvement of efficiency of AI and Machine Learning (ML) project outcomes.
- Help with service models and service key performance indicators.
- Improvement integration and data exchanges between internal and external applications.
- Improvement in resource coordination and collaboration.
- Improvement in Cloud Data Management interchanges with organizational models and interchanges with DevOps to improve organizational performance, governance, and interpretability.
- Improvement in supply chain management internal and external to the organization.
- Improvements in Hybrid Cloud Storage of data, information, and knowledge.
- Improvement in overall cloud computing as a service.
Data Management should not be an afterthought. Data drives decisions. The future of Cloud Storage is bright. The future of Cloud Data Management is growing as organizations realize how to leverage data and analytics for emerging technologies. Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom about your services, organization, collaborations, and exchanges drives success and winning the competition. Data Management in the Cloud is here now and will continue to strive in the future of cloud computing. Look for innovations and futures with all cloud providers, including areas such as the Google Cloud future.
Data Management in Cloud Computing
Every application and service is supported with data on a platform underpinned by an information technology infrastructure. Data Management in the cloud makes sense today as companies shift to focus on their core competency instead of managing the information technology stack with professional resources supporting each component and asset on-premises in the organization.
Automation of everything possible has been a theme in information technology for a long time. Organizations have tried “lights out” or “dim lights” operations strategies for many years to remove manual labor and effort from the equation of delivering and supporting the organization’s services. Disciplines such as storage management have a long history of automation from tape, disk, optical, CD, and other media. Each required management disciplines around the data center, including its talent, to accomplish the needed outcomes. Today, with Storage Management in cloud computing, organizations can think of storage as an off-the-shelf commodity to access and use as required. Of course, there are still requirements for capabilities in the organization to manage the data and storage of the data. Still, now all the underpinning technology knowledge is not needed as before. Now, the management of data in the cloud can be based on business outcomes instead of detailed technical requirements and configurations.
Data Management in cloud computing is here to stay as trust increases, and budgets have to be used more for business projects than IT projects. Organizations have tried to have a mantra that will only focus on business projects, and there are no more IT projects. Cloud data management and overall cloud computing capabilities are making this a reality today. There are many organizations today that are primary companies based on their cloud capabilities. They own no IT equipment, except personal computers and another personal device for interfacing with the cloud. Their IT resources are cloud-enabled, usually focused on delivery and support of applications, not the once traditional other IT disciplines. The cloud provider does almost all the IT work on behalf of their cloud customers.
Mistakes to avoid
Cloud Data Management is not a panacea, but the capabilities of the cloud make it much easier and faster to deliver and support the customer with services. There are still many mistakes that organizations can make by utilizing the cloud. Data Management best practices to reduce problems do exist for cloud computing.
Here is a list of a few common mistakes to avoid.
Data Management Issues
These issues can arise from a flawed strategy, tactics, project plans, and operations to deliver and support your services. Cloud strategy can be segmented into multiple strategies to reduce the complexity of the strategy, understand the value stream between the strategies and produce the strategic plan that should be comprehensive and collaborative between the strategies of the organization to support the business outcomes needed. It is essential to understand how data is used for decision support, what decisions need to be made, and who or what, such as automated or using emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Data Management Risks
Risks, of course, can be accepted, avoided, transferred, and mitigated. For data management, create a risk register and follow risk management guidelines. Determine your risk tolerance and build it into your overall strategy, tactics, and daily operations.
Data Management risks and Controls
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) support each other through Data Management Controls. This has to be in place to assure business continuity and conformance for business operations, including cloud operations.
Data management problems can exist in the cloud. This is usually not because of the cloud today. Cloud computing has matured and is very reliable, efficient, effective, and economical for organizational use. The problem is usually with the data and analytics. Data Management must be taken seriously from the security, storage, and platform consideration and the data itself. Data has to be appropriately recorded, maintained, consistent, truthful, and used for decision support. Overall, data has to have value. Data with no value and is just stored can cause many issues for an organization, especially if the data causes performance issues or contributes to bad decisions for the organization and its people. Data rapidly increases, and organizations should have a data management strategy and the appropriate technology capabilities to help them achieve their business goals and outcomes.