Today, organisations are flooded with big data from an ever-growing variety of sources.
Analysing this data has become a major business imperative, which means most companies face growing pressure to build big data solutions quickly for competitive advantage.
Cloud infrastructure is increasingly providing the flexibility and power needed to underpin the development of agile big data projects.
“Agility requires quick strategic decision-making processes,” says Martin Hooper, Head of Business, Information Technology Services, Australia, CenturyLink.
“Big data technology can provide the insight necessary to make fast decisions based on complex information, but is often restricted by the platform on which it runs.
“Cloud infrastructure can unlock the ability for big data to deliver insights quickly, and at scale.”
Hooper believes there are six key reasons why big data analytics and cloud computing are a “perfect match” for companies competing in today’s climate:
1. Growing pressure to accelerate enterprise time-to-insight
Big data projects based in the cloud or on managed services let companies accelerate time-to-insight by rapidly acquiring and scaling big data infrastructure that previously had to be built from scratch.
2. Adapt to the pace of business
As the pace of business change accelerates, the ability to gain insights quickly from big data has become critical. But that accelerating business change demands agility: the ability to scale up and scale down instantly. The cloud has the flexibility to accommodate this scalability.
3. Capacity to quickly scale from pilot to production
Companies trying to scale their big data pilot projects into full-fledged production systems often realise too late in the process that the projects require resources they lack in-house. A cloud deployment can provide the computing power needed, and fast.
4. Less expensive than in-house solutions
Companies no longer need to build their own expensive infrastructure for big data applications. Instead, with cloud infrastructure, they can simply acquire and scale the services they need, as they need them.
5. Strong security for protecting data
With so much depending on big data projects, the right security measures are essential. Secure big data solutions can facilitate the implementation of several layers of security to protect data.
6. Easy implementation with hybrid managed IT partner
The right cloud partner can provide end-to-end solutions, from planning to optimisation, propelling time-to-successful-implementation.
