WP_Data Management Best Practices

W H I T E P A P E R

www.persistent.com

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Some benefits of IaaS public clouds and hybrid clouds include:

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Less expensive storage of backups

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Customers can tune their particular requirements, in particular across SLAs such as high availability,

disaster recovery, or providing on-demand, externally-provisioned scalability when computing demands

spike.

The following benefits are common to private and public data warehouses:

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Elastic sandboxes and data marts for self-service workloads, for business analysts and data scientists.

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Faster setup of Proof-of-Concept (PoC) environments for sales and presales teams.

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Cheaper developer environments for new applications and for porting legacy applications.

The reasons to prefer private data warehouses include:

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Security: as private clouds are dedicated to a single organization, the hardware, storage and network can be

designed tomeet high security levels.

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Compliance, for instance, HIPAA in healthcare in the US and PCI in the global payment card industry, is much

easier to achieve, for the same reason.

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Performance and scalability SLAs are easier to guarantee, as the hardware is no longer shared among several

tenants.

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In the case of external private cloud providers, if there is enough scale in terms of storage and hardware

equipment, true elastic scaling can generally be provided (e.g., through MPP databases), which is not

always the case in data centers internal to the company.

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On the other hand, you have more control in internal private clouds for the hardware you want the data

center to run. In particular, the customer is free to choose a particular DWappliance or scale-up server that

is known to suit their needs, which external providers may not give you, as their default is to run on

commodity hardware

We have recently witnessed hybrid cloud environments gaining a lot of traction in the market. This may translate into

demand of hybrid cloud data warehouses. Indeed, customers may have good reasons to prefer private clouds for

specific areas of their warehouse (e.g., sensitive data areas). However, if other areas don't need, e.g., security or

compliance as much, and could benefit from higher capacity at lower cost from a public cloud provider, hybrid

architecture for this data warehouse is a possibility: data can be sliced such that only sensitive data stays private.

Another driver may be SLAs such as high availability, disaster recovery and, well, performanc

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3.1.2 Cloud data integration

In cloud warehousing deployments, the fundamental data management processes – data integration, data quality ,

data governance, master data management – still need to be applied to information that is warehoused in the cloud.

This is not always true: some external providers may let you specify and customize the hardware.

It was initially hard to negotiate SLAs with public cloud providers but, overall, they are getting better at this: for instance, some vendors now

offer high availability. Make sure you understand this area if you are working with a private cloud provider as well.