The Cloud Must Power Data for a Competitive Advantage

When cloud services were originally introduced, they were embraced as a way to store data — particularly cold data sets that needed to be retained, but rarely retrieved. Now, enterprises are drowning in data, and the shift to storing data in the cloud is a matter of survival.

While it’s imperative that data be retained for storage, what will create a competitive advantage for enterprises is the ability to harness data’s power to inform marketing strategies, website designs, and operations.

Data is a powerful tool, but much of it is unstructured. Before data can be structured for meaningful use, there are a few considerations that enterprises must keep in mind for storing data in the cloud:

  • Ensure that data is in good order, so that it will be in good order in the cloud. Shifting data storage to the cloud won’t solve warehousing issues.
  • Determine which types of data will reside in on-premises servers and which will reside in cloud servers. Depending on geography and the age of the data, it will likely make sense to keep some data closer with an on-site storage option.
  • Evaluate the type of environment that best suits your data needs, whether this is a public cloud server, a private, on-premises cloud server, or a hybrid cloud solution.

Data will soon be driving business. As AI and machine learning become more advanced, the structuring of data will be critical for companies wanting a competitive advantage. Data will be used to anticipate customer behaviors, and AI will be used to provide customers with what they need before they have asked for it. Two items are necessary for this to take place:

  1. Enterprises must be able to gather and analyze the full range of data, which will require cloud solutions that can compute and quantify a variety of types of data.
  2. There must be controlled access to data sets, with transparency regarding who is using the data and what it is being used for.

Cloud computing is on a steady advancement path, with the ability to structure data and use it to inform business processes on the near horizon. Enterprises considering data storage in the cloud should embrace it and other cloud services, because the ability to remain competitive will depend upon it.

At One Connect we offer enterprises a way to experience all the advantages of a dedicated, highly secure data center environment without the cost and hassle of managing it. Contact us to learn more about cloud data storage.