What is a Cloud Data Warehouse?

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According to a Gartner survey on big data investments, most companies want to be data-driven but aren’t seeing their big data projects through to production, let alone seeing a return on investment. 

In fact, 73% of Gartner survey respondents say their organization has invested in or is planning to invest in big data, but only 15% say their organization has deployed their big data project to production.* 

Why aren't big data goals being reached?

At a high level, the answer is tied to traditional data warehouse concepts.

Silos: Organizations have a large amount of data coming from disparate data sources such as web and cloud applications, mobile devices, and business systems, but this data is not being pulled together in an accessible way.

Complexity: Siloed data management systems are complex and require manpower with a specialized set of skills. Often times, only the most sophisticated companies have the people they need to effectively work with the information at hand. 

Cost: Storing huge amounts of data on traditional warehousing technology comes with huge upfront capital costs and costs to store multiple copies of data. 

Delays: When data users do need to access the data, it takes longer, slowing down production time and wasting valuable time.  

What is a cloud data warehouse?

The difference between a database and a data warehouse is that databases record data. A data warehouse is designed to handle the kinds of complex queries that help businesses people make better decisions. In many companies, nearly all of the data is stored in a multitude of disparate databases. If you're wondering how a data warehouse can benefit you, the key questions to ask are: How accessible is that data? How much will it cost to extract, store, and analyze all of it? What will happen if you don’t? This is where cloud data warehousing comes into play. 

Any organization depending on data to better serve its customers, streamline its operations, and lead its industry will benefit from a cloud data warehouse. Unlike massive, traditional data warehouses, the cloud means businesses big and small can size their data warehouse to meet their needs and their budget, and dynamically grow and contract their system as things change from day-to-day and year-to-year.  

Why do you need a cloud data warehouse?

Here are a few areas where cutting-edge cloud data warehouse technology can significantly improve a company’s operations: 

• Customer experience: Monitoring end-user behavior in real time can help organizations tailor products, services, and special offers to the needs of individual consumers. With customer sentiment analysis, companies better understand customers by analyzing massive amounts of social media postings, tweets, and other online activity. 
• Quality assurance: Organizations can also use streaming data to monitor for early warning signs of customer service issues or product shortcomings. They can take action in minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks, which was not possible when the only data source was call center complaint logs.
• Operational efficiency: Operational intelligence (OI) consists of monitoring the business and analyzing events to identify where an organization can reduce costs, boost margins, streamline processes, and respond to market forces more rapidly. By relieving your organization of managing a data warehouse, you can focus on analyzing data.  
• Innovation: Instead of only checking the rear-view mirror to understand an industry’s recent past, companies can use new sources of data and data analytics (predictive, prescriptive, machine learning) to spot and capitalize on trends, thereby disrupting their industry before an unknown or unforeseen competitor does so first. 

Although there are many different reasons why organizations need data warehouses, it's important to remember that implementing a data warehouse solution can help you create efficiencies with data collection, data analysis, and data accuracy. If you'd like to learn more about the benefits of a data warehouse for your particular organization, contact us to learn more about how our consultants can leverage Snowflake’s Cloud Data Warehouse to help you reach your 2020 data strategy. 

*Gartner, “Survey Analysis: Big Data Investments Begin Tapering in 2016”, October 2016 

This post was originally published on January 28, 2020 and updated on November 19, 2020.