Exploring challenges in cloud data management for enterprise clients

Common challenges in cloud data management environments

Enterprise clients have to deal with unfathomable volumes of data and data sets that continually expand and morph. Without the ability to effectively capture, process, manage, store, and use data for analytics, the potential for a business to use data insights to drive progress is severely diminished. 

While cloud environments provide a scalable platform, the tendency for enterprises to have a mix of several cloud storage platforms, on-site architecture, and hybrid infrastructure can lead to a number of problems. Especially considering the speed with which businesses must now collect and process data, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks or go wrong.

Here are some of the leading challenges with data management in the cloud:

• Duplicated Data
• Unpredictable Costs
• Storage Performance Issues
• Lack of Data Governance

Businesses need cloud solutions to stay competitive in today’s world. Data can be safely stored and accessed whenever required for any company operations. It provides flexibility to work from anywhere in the world and data is not dependent on local servers. Application of cloud services can be overwhelming in the beginning so you can take help from ITSvit consulting services. Their team has expertise so that you can easily navigate to cloud services and make sure that your valuable data is secure.

Let’s break these down further and explore potential solutions.

Data duplicates

Cloud providers typically bill based on data volumes; the more data a business stores, the higher their bill will be. Any duplicated data, data that takes up space without actually providing a tangible benefit, is an easy way to increase your enterprise cloud bill without gaining more from it. 

There are two potential methods to overcome data duplication issues. The first is to enact processes to ensure there is a clear pathway that outlines where new data is being stored. If you notice that data is flowing to two distinct cloud warehouses you use, then you should endeavor to simplify data capturing to avoid duplicated records.

Alternatively, you could use data deduplication across all of your connected data repositories. Data deduplication splits blocks of data into smaller chunks, giving each segment a hash value. By comparing the hash values across all of the data your business stores, you can then find duplicates, compare them, and eliminate them.

Unpredictable costs

When you deal with multiple cloud environments at once, you can easily incur additional costs from accidentally overutilizing certain resources, or underutilizing others. While these costs may not appear staggering at first, when they add up over the space of a few months or years, they can create a major drain of resources for your business.

As you add more cloud tools, cloud data warehouses, and other integral parts of architecture, the overall complexity of your system increases. With this increase, your business is unable to track expenditures to the same extent.

One effective solution for this is to regularly conduct data audits of all your cloud systems. These audits can reveal where you are lacking or overusing resources, as well as determining if your budget is being effectively spent. While regular audits will also incur a cost, they will save much more capital in the long run.

Storage performance issues

Performance challenges are one of the central issues that businesses face when dealing with cloud and multi-cloud environments. Especially in the latter case, different cloud providers can offer vastly different capabilities in terms of querying data and producing insight efficiently.

For example, when comparing Snowflake vs Bigquery, each cloud data warehouse offers a different level of performance when it comes to scaling. For enterprise clients, finding a cloud data platform that can index data and streamline the process of fetching data for a query will help to increase overall efficiency. As enterprise businesses continue to scale, they must use cloud data warehouses and tools that allow them to do so without creating any bottlenecks. 

Another potential issue you could encounter is whether or not the cloud vendor has a good standard of uptime. If you partner with a provider that is infamous for having unreliable servers, your business will directly suffer from their inefficiency.

The best solution when looking to improve performance issues in a cloud environment is to partner with leading providers. Bigger names in the industry have achieved that status due to their sizeable founding companies, or due to their exceptional service. Finding a provider that has the correct tools, solutions, and performance capabilities will help your enterprise shine.

Lack of data governance

Where there is data, there should be data governance. Unfortunately, as enterprises grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to effectively manage data governance policies and enforce them. Data governance is the process of ensuring data is usable, available, and integral. It uses systems and policies like data quality monitoring, data protection, and data compliance to ensure data reaches the right standard before entering into analytics processes.

When working with cloud providers, data governance isn’t always as clear compared to when working with on-site infrastructure. Due to this, IT teams must adapt their processes to understand the cloud governance processes and align with them. Instead of forcing a governance scheme that the cloud provider cannot guarantee, it’s a much better idea to adapt to the cloud’s governance schemes.

While this won’t be an overnight fix, it can lead to a much higher quality of data down the line.

Conclusion

While cloud environments can come with an array of negatives for enterprise clients to overcome, they are still one of the leading data resources we have at our disposal. Instead of shying away from the cloud due to some of its underlying frustrations, it’s important to understand why these bottlenecks occur and set out to fix them.

If enterprise clients create a systematic and effective data management, compliance, and governance scheme, they are much more likely to deal with data efficiently. Minimizing expenditure in the cloud is directly linked to efficient operations. By understanding the core challenges that your business may face, you’ll be in a much better position to overcome them.