Data Cloud

What is Data Cloud?

A data cloud is a singular data management environment for enterprise organizations. Through its structure, data cloud eliminates silos, prevents fragmentation, and initiates connection of all data within an enterprise’s data infrastructure.

How does a data cloud work?

A data cloud functions through data sources, data architectures, and cloud platforms. It works via a single cloud analytics platform to establish connections and unified management of a data architecture. By eliminating data silos, a data cloud enables enterprise organizations with the consistent understanding and deeper insights, and stores the resulting insights in the cloud that best suits their objectives.

How are enterprises solving problems with data clouds?

One of the key problems that enterprises have addressed through data cloud infrastructures is accessibility. Many enterprise organizations lack ability to easily access critical information, often impacting insights and profitability, as well as creating confusion or frustration within every tier of their employee and customer base. Another issue lies in diversified data ecosystems—without a singular architecture for all data sources and data platforms, there are deep restrictions on automations, compliance, and a variety of other standardization requirements.

What are the characteristics of a data cloud?

There are three key components of a data cloud, with characteristics critical to enterprise organizations’ success within their data environments. With the ability to deeply understand a wide array of data, and with disregard to sources, locations, and structure, data cloud is incredibly precise and efficient. This data architecture is built from three layers.

1. With the ability to consolidate and process data insights from an entire enterprise’s data sources, a data cloud functions to refine data without redundancy. The data intake is not restricted by format (structured or unstructured) or location of the data (on-premises or in the cloud).

2. Data architecture, including data lakes and data warehouses, provides the structure required for an organization to host their newly-refined data. This is where the cloud establishes a connection between all data architectures to leverage them for clear and quick data insights that benefit business outcomes and ROIs.

3. The cloud platform acts as the intelligence of a data cloud, with the ability to establish a single source of truth, allowing it to be utilized in a variety of settings to gain deeper actionable insights. A cloud platform has the capacity for deployment either in a multi-cloud or on-premises environment, providing an organization with the choice of deployment method that provides the most critical benefits.

What are the benefits of a data cloud?

The benefits of a data cloud include a sharpened capacity to establish a single source of truth, while reducing complexities within data architectures. With such an overwhelming amount of data being processed by organizations in today’s market, there is an intense need for critical organization tactics. These are easily implemented within the structure of a data cloud, as the data cloud quite literally provides the infrastructure for more seamless and efficient data intake, data consolidation, data storage, and data retrieval.

Another direct benefit to data cloud applications is found in customer service and staff management. Due to the increased accessibility and efficiency within a data cloud’s architecture, insights, information, and content are all easily retrievable for both customer satisfaction and staff’s ease of use. With the speed of today’s markets, data must be easily stored and accessed to promote better insights and empower the best decision making, both for the customer and the business perspectives.

What are the challenges with a data cloud?

The data cloud is not a widely utilized data architecture, as it is such a new platform. While enterprise organizations have been using hybrid-cloud environments for decades, a data cloud environment is new to the market. Because of this, security risks pose a challenge to this new dynamic data environment.

With an increasing convergence of operational technology (OT) and informational technology (IT), there are increasingly more complex cyberattacks within organizations’ data architectures. Because both information and operations are now threatened by these attacks, enterprises can hesitate to transform their digital landscape to the data cloud. With stronger security offerings becoming more available, organizations are becoming more willing to migrate their environments to the data cloud.

Another challenge to the data cloud involves cost. With such rapidly evolving data landscapes, enterprise organizations often struggle to keep up with updates and new offerings, despite recognizing the risk of their data architecture becoming outdated. With newer and better options constantly saturating the market, data cloud has not been widely accepted.

Management poses another challenge, with the hesitation stemming from governance and control not being readily available. As data landscapes evolve, there is a growing need for expertise–without this expertise, organizations cannot manage the platform appropriately or reap the full range of benefits.

Enabling data clouds with HPE

Data cloud protection services from HPE deliver agility and unlock innovation by helping organizations safeguard their assets and making the most of their data. Leverage data services with HPE GreenLake, and bring the cloud to apps and data everywhere. Now available on a pay-per-use structure, HPE GreenLake provides just enough resources for your data environment and IT management. With this service, your organization can deliver cloud operations efficiently, unify data management like never before, and accelerate innovation to keep you in front of your competition.

HPE Cloud Volumes Backup provides data protection in the cloud, as a service, to deliver efficient and seamless backup storage within their storage arrays. With this backup service, your organization can experience a unified backup in the cloud, data activation, no egress charges, open cloud ecosystems, and resilient protection from cyberattacks.

Accelerate with SLA-based ordering from HPE GreenLake for block storage through workload-optimized tiers, data infrastructure deployment, and a single, intuitive SaaS-based UX accessible from anywhere. The available SaaS-based apps can power your operational experience from core, to edge, to cloud with AI-driven infrastructure management at scale, all available as a service.