Security Concerns of Data Warehouse on Cloud

The agile and scalable data warehouse can be created within minutes, with real-time data to provide significant insights regarding new product development, detecting frauds, improving customer loyalty or optimal pricing. By taking it to the cloud, you can accelerate and simplify data warehouse development. While data management and integration are two critical aspects of cloud data warehousing, data governance and security are the two other aspects that need as much attention.

Your data warehouse is a wealth of organizational information right from financial to those related to customers and employees, credit card details and organizational trade secrets. This makes it vulnerable to cyberattacks from malicious outsiders and insiders. While cloud service providers may have security provisions, research shows that it is not completely safe and it is important for you to have data governance and security to protect your sensitive data on cloud as well.

Cloud data warehouse is vulnerable to four types of attacks:

• DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service where the servers are overwhelmed and unable to service genuine user request
• Data breaches due to unauthorized access
• Data loss due to deletion by accident, with malicious intent, or due to physical destruction of the infrastructure
• Visitors accessing your services through insecure points
• Timely alerts in case of potential threats

Data Governance for Greater Security

Insecure data not only poses a threat to data but also has the potential to tarnish your reputation, for customers to lose trust, compromises the safety of your employees and your business as well as a drop in revenues.

According to a Ponemon survey of more than 3,000 people in 507 companies, the data breach lifecycle in 2019 was longer at 279 days than that of 266 days in 2018. The malicious attacks lifecycle was longer by 12.5% at 314 days. While a lifecycle of more than 200 days cost companies $4.56 million, those shorter than that cost $3.34 million for a breach. The most common and costly causes of the breaches were malicious attacks at a per capita cost of $166.

This makes data governance and data security critical to protect data as well as ensure its integrity, availability and usability. Regulatory compliance is another reason why you need data governance for your cloud data warehouse. While protecting stakeholder interests, it also enables you to standardize your processes and procedures, improves your efficacy at a lower cost and enhances the quality of workflows and decision making.

Meeting Your Data Governance Needs

Indium Software, with expertise in Big Data technologies, understands that the key requirements of a good data governance are the clear definition of:

• Processes
• Roles
• Policies
• Standards
• Metrics

This enables establishing access rights, responsibilities and accountability to protect sensitive data and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. It also ensures that the data is available consistently across the business with common terminology but is flexible enough to let individual business units retain it as per their needs. Most importantly, Indium ensures that all functions have access to a single version of truth that can provide them with deeper insights to develop strategies for their operations while aligning it with the organizational goals.

Indium’s endeavors to implement data governance includes ensuring greater data accuracy and completeness along with better data integration by creating a clear data map for data related to all key entities.

Indium also ensures that your data governance implementation complies with the guidelines provided by regulatory bodies such as the US HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as industry requirements such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards).

While having the policies that will govern the security and usage of your enterprise data is important, there is no silver bullet to protect your data. It will depend on your organizational needs and should be configured accordingly using the appropriate tools. It should be an integral part and an extension of your overall IT governance strategy for a smooth and seamless implementation.

Indium’s aim for implementing data governance, in short, is to establish a code of conduct and best practices for improved data management meeting legal, security, and compliance needs best suited to your organization and ensuring growth.

About Indium

Indium, a more-than-two-decades-old software company, has wide and deep experience in end-to-end delivery of Big Data solutions as well as in other cutting edge technologies such as AI, Blockchain, data analytics, application development and in the traditional platforms.

Our teams have cross-domain experience as well as expertise in the technology offerings. We offer high level services including consulting, implementation, on-going maintenance & managed services. To implement data governance and security in your cloud data warehouse, contact us now.

The post Data Governance and Security of Cloud Data Warehouse appeared first on Indium.

However, not all companies today have adopted the cloud data warehouse approach. This article aims to help answer why you should move your data warehouse to the cloud. We will be covering two main topics in this article:

Question 1 – A data warehouse in the cloud – Do you need it?

Most definitely, yes! Just see how quickly your data warehouse is growing or even look at the number of project requests that are increasing for new data warehouses, new data lakes, new discovery sandboxes, faster query times, and more. Every IT department looks for a silver lining to meet the growing demands of business access that are routed through their business units. That silver lining is the cloud!

Question 2: What is expected from a cloud data warehouse, and how can you benefit from it? The list goes on, but I have narrowed it down to 6 key benefits:

Fast and Easy Deployment:

IT teams in the past, had to take into account how much storage and compute power they would require, at times even 2 years in advance. In the event of getting this information wrong, it would mean that extra hardware that was not needed was purchased or facing complaints regarding a dearth of storage.

However, this rather complicated and exhaustive planning & estimation process is not required in today’s day and age. By leveraging the cloud, users can build their own sandboxes, data warehouses or datamarts in minutes at any time of the day. One key advantage of having the data warehouse on cloud is that organizations only for the required resources when they are required.

Much needed Elasticity at significantly Lower Costs:

The major reason as to why people move to a data warehouse in the cloud is cost. A really expensive task is storing data in your own data center on premise. While expanding your data footprint, it becomes very tough to support your continuous analytical needs.

The immediate question that arises is Why? In the case of an on-premise data warehouse, you can’t quickly or easily scale, compute and store. In the event of you needing more storage, the compute will come along with it and the costs for both with have to be born.

Additionally, the need to purchase the requisite compute at peak times will also arise. Take the case of a retail company that needs to predict how much compute would be required to handle a Black Friday sale, they are stuck with the same compute for the rest of the year.

With a cloud data warehouse, that doesn’t need to be the case.

With the ideal cloud data warehouse in place, your system will be able to scale instantly and flexibly to deliver the required amount of compute that is necessary. As compute and storage are separate, only the essentialities will need to be purchased. The add on costs such as server rooms, hardware, networking , etc is also eliminated.

Data Security Concerns:

On-premise data warehouses were always considered to be the more secure option. Just like how the trust in digital copies increased when compared to physical paper copies, people are now starting to see as to why cloud data warehouses are more secure than on-premise data warehouses.

However, this as well entirely depends on the database possessed by the company.

Capabilities growing tremendously:

The overall value of your data warehouse tremendously improves when your data warehouse in the cloud. With better availability, performance and scalability, business intelligence and other applications can seamlessly deliver quicker and better insights.

The entire spectrum of data warehousing solutions such as data integration, business analytics, IoT and much more with the capability of being a fully integrated solution is possible with your data warehouse being in the cloud.

Self-Service Data Warehousing:

A self-driving data warehouse is what makes self-service entirely possible. An autonomous, self-driving data warehouse its own set of benefits. Management of the data warehouse does not become a worry for you anymore.

This means that you can reap the benefits of complete automation of upgrades, patching, and management. Using a data warehouse in the cloud means all you need to do is log into the cloud and allocate a new data warehouse in minutes – you do not need to depend on IT for this like before.

Availability and accessibility of data is more than ever.

IT teams now have the liberty to concentrate their resources and attention on providing business value from a strategic stand-point. This does not imply that database analysts (DBAs) are out of a job. Managing of applications connecting to a data warehouse and how developers use in database functions within their application code will still be done by DBAs. 

The Cloud in itself:

Database that is self-driving makes life a lot easier because it handles the monotonous yet essential work that executives do not want to do. The much-needed ability and capability in the cloud can be gained with the self-serving database.

Cloud data warehouse adoption may just be one step out of a multi-step journey for many organizations. The cloud provider must ensure complete PaaS, IaaS & SaaS solutions.

IT infrastructure can be simplified, and capital investments can be minimized by leveraging your cloud’s services for data management, business intelligence, applications, and infrastructure.

Whilst choosing a cloud, it is imperative that you pick one that allows for flexible deployment models. This will enable you to migrate on-premise workloads to your cloud data centers and vice-versa seamlessly.

Conclusion

Having a data warehouse in the cloud has plenty of benefits. But going beyond that is what we need to strive for. Assess how a self-driving data warehouse can be of help and make maximum use of it.

The post 6 Main Benefits of having a Cloud data Warehouse in Place! appeared first on Indium.