Cloud Data Architecture Benefits: Getting Value from CDAs

Building new data-drive solutions on cloud and the migration of older ones requires an investment of considerable time, money, and corporate will power. Managers (both business and technical) need to ensure that the effort will have a noticeable return on that investment. Luckily, cloud-based data management and analytics yields several benefits, both business and technical. 

General Benefits of Using a Cloud Platform 

Using a cloud as your compute platform, instead of old-fashioned on-premises infrastructure, usually leads to significant improvements in certain areas of performance and maintenance: 

CDA leverages the automatic elasticity of cloud

Elasticity provisions cloud resources, such as storage, memory, and CPU resources, to data management and data products to enable their speed and scale. Even better, these resources are provisioned (then reallocated, as workloads come and go) in an automated way that minimizes human involvement for maintenance and performance tuning. 

A CDA is an opportunity for improvement

Whether you’re migrating older solutions or building new ones, cloud is an opportunity to improve such solutions. For example, deploying them a modern, high-performance cloud as the compute platform is one kind of improvement. As another example, moving to cloud is a chance to redesign and reengineer solutions, so they have an architecture that leverages the strength of cloud, while enabling new data practices, such as the data lake, data science, and self-service. 

Business Benefits resulting from a CDA 

Business activities that rely on data are inhibited when data is distributed across many enterprise applications and other source systems. These activities are more feasible and valuable when a data architecture unifies diverse data by collecting it in a centralized data architecture. In fact, many organizations choose to place the next generation of their data architecture on cloud, because cloud has the speed and scale that modern data architectures need for large centralized systems, plus attractive low maintenance and capacity pricing. 

A number of benefits ensue, which elevate use cases that business people value the most. Business-oriented data practices thus improved include self-service data exploration and discovery; zero-copy data sharing across enterprise departments; richer business reporting and strategic analytics; end-to-end business views of processes and entities, via data in the architecture; observability; and data governance, compliance, and security. All these are greatly simplified by the centralization of the CDA. 

Technology Benefits resulting from a CDA 

The heavily distributed data described earlier in this guide presents challenges to CDA technology, too. Distributed data makes data management complex to build, and results in an excessive amount of data movement. It also makes it difficult to optimize for performance management solutions that operate on data in many physical storage locations. Again, the centralization of data into a cloud-based data architecture simplifies and streamlines these solutions, to effect valuable technical benefits. These benefits come from collocating data into fewer storage locations and merging data into fewer datasets, which in turn leads to more efficient data ingestion, refinement, and delivery.  

A centralized, standardized, consolidated, shared CDA tends toward better data standardization, reusability, observability, and monitoring. Data engineering methods (perhaps in the form of DataOps) becomes easier to operationalize, monitor for productivity, and optimize as a process.