FEATURE : CLOUD SOLUTIONS
Alan Eldridge , Asia Pacific Director of Sales Engineering at Snowflake , describes the evolution of the cloud from infrastructure into a service .
Azure and Google , these providers offer access to virtually unlimited storage and compute resources .
Yet , while these services deliver clear and significant business benefits , they have also created some challenges when it comes to data management . Many organizations have , probably inadvertently , reached the point where they have created a number of data silos with different sets stored within different cloud providers .
For example , the finance department might be using Azure while the sales department keeps its data within salesforce . com . At the same time , marketing might have become reliant on AWS while the research and development team makes extensive use of Google ’ s cloud .
During the past 15 years , cloud computing has evolved from being a technical novelty to something that underpins many aspects of daily business activity .
This can make it difficult to access and use data in a holistic way . To access and combine different data sets can be come a complex and time-consuming technical challenge . As a result , many organizations can find they are missing out on opportunities to extract the maximum value from the data they have at their disposal .
The rise of the data cloud
Organizations that were wary of entrusting their core applications and data to a third party have become comfortable with the concept and understand the significant benefits it can deliver . Some have reached the stage where they are now 100 % cloud based .
This evolution has been supported by the rise of a number of large public cloud service providers . Lead by companies such as Amazon Web Services , Microsoft
To overcome this challenge , there is a new development within the public cloud environment . The data cloud evolves cloud computing from being an infrastructure into being a service .
In this new environment , organizations can make use of the cloud without needing to worry about the specifics of the platform underpinning it . Just like you can make use of Netflix or Spotify without needing to know the
How the cloud is evolving from an infrastructure into a service
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