Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 32 | Page 84

FINAL WORD What is a cloud data warehouse and why is it important? The benefits of cloud technology are indisputable and we are rapidly witnessing the advantages it can offer to businesses. Rob Mellor, VP and GM EMEA, WhereScape, discusses five positives to utilising a cloud data warehouse in today’s digital landscape. We are seeing business expectations for on-demand data explode, with many data warehousing teams beginning to transition their data warehousing efforts to the cloud. The need to efficiently pull together data from a wide range of ever-evolving data sources and present it in a consumable way to a broadening audience of decision-makers means cloud data warehousing is proving invaluable. Here, we cover the basics and explore cloud data warehousing; how the cloud data warehouse compares to the traditional data warehouse, and the benefits of a cross-cloud solution. What is a cloud data warehouse? A cloud data warehouse is a database service hosted online by a public cloud company. It has the functionality of an on-premises database but is managed by a third party, can be accessed remotely and its memory and compute power can be shrunk or grown instantly. Traditional vs. cloud data warehouse differences A traditional data warehouse is an architecture for organising, storing and accessing ordered data, hosted in a data centre on-premises owned by the organisation whose data is stored within it. It is of a 84 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com