As technology continues to advance, so does the amount of data generated on a daily basis, both internally – through marketing, sales, production, and finance, among others – and externally, from sources like the internet of things.

Storing and analysing all this data requires a dedicated system that can integrate a variety of data types, as well as provide information and insight. Not all traditional, on-site data warehouses are still up to the task. Because of this, cloud data warehousing has emerged, which has opened doors for organisations of all sizes and types.

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Like a traditional data warehouse, a cloud data warehouse is a computer system dedicated to storing and analysing data to find patterns and correlations that lead to information and insight. Data warehouses also store and integrate data from multiple sources in varying formats. However, cloud data warehousing is based in the cloud, not in a traditional, on-premise location, and as such can be bought from and managed by a vendor in an as-a-service product.

With that in mind, here are four business benefits of cloud data warehousing.

1: Cloud data warehousing meets current and future needs

Flexibility is an important factor of cloud data warehousing. Organisations will have the ability to scale compute and storage independently, pending the company’s needs. So, if a business needs more storage today, they won’t also be forced to add more compute. But if their situation changes in the future, they can adjust however needed.

2: Data is accommodated and integrated in one place

With the help of data analytics, semi-structured data has the capability to provide next-level insights beyond what traditional data can provide. But semi-structured data must be loaded and transformed before an organisation can analyse it—this is a process most traditional data warehouses can’t handle, but one that cloud data warehouses can.

This ability to support diverse data without performance issues ensures all of an organisation’s data can be loaded and integrated in one location. This not only increases flexibility, but it also means all data can be managed and maintained in one system, reducing costs.

3: Cloud data warehousing saves money

Between licensing fees, hardware, set-up, management, securing and backing up data, and more, conventional data warehouses can cost millions. Not to mention building one that can hold the variety and volume required by today’s standards ups the cost even more.

However, using cloud data warehousing as a service (as it is commonly used today) can cut costs significantly, while keeping all the same features. Relying on service providers to maintain systems and only purchasing the amount of support needed helps organisations stretch their budgets further and avoid paying for unnecessary features.

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4: Data is secured at rest and in transit

An important aspect to analysing and storing data is keeping that data safe. In addition to the use of vendor-conducted penetration tests to check for vulnerabilities in the system, modern data warehouses do this through confidentiality and integrity measures.

Confidentiality practices prevent unauthorised access to data, and are usually done through role-based access control, which only allows those permitted to access the data to do so, and multi-factor authentication, which requires users to enter a code (usually one sent to a mobile phone) and ensures a stolen username and password can’t be used to access the system.

Integrity measures guarantee data isn’t modified or corrupted, and entails the use of encryption practices and encryption keys to protect data from unauthorised prying eyes.

Businesses can now up their data centre management game, thanks to the launch of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT Advisor, an easy to deploy data centre management platform.

IT Advisor combines cloud-based planning and modelling to uncover where businesses can make savings and improve uptime through optimising their facilities.

It can also analyse the business impact that decisions are having on the entire environment, automating workflows to ensure the data centre is running at its optimum.

“Hybrid data centre architectures are driving the industry to rethink the way their data centre infrastructure is managed and operated” said Kim Povlsen, vice president and general manager of Digital Services and Software at Schneider Electric.

“EcoStruxure IT Advisor addresses this need by offering customers a powerful cloud-based or on-premise data centre planning and modelling software, accessible from anywhere, and delivered with a flexible subscription model.”

Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT Advisor features asset management, laying out data in each environment and enabling teams to view device details and asset attributes in a logical way.

In-depth risk planning models potential incidents and demonstrates the impact they may have on devices and infrastructure, while change management is supported by automated workflows, reducing the possibility of human error and ensuring best practices are out in place.

Schneider Electric has also integrated features to help co-location facilities understand how data is distributed.

It maps out areas, cages and racks with assets in a “floor view”, displaying how racks are being utilised so organisations know where there is space and make sure they’re using their resources in the most logical and efficient manner.

The IT Advisor system is an expansion of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT platform, which also includes EcoStruxure IT Expert, software that allows for the monitoring of physical IoT assets, and EcoStruxure Asset Advisor, a 24/7 monitoring service provided through its partner network.

HPE and Nutanix have expanded their partnership with the launch of an integrated hybrid cloud-as-a-service platform, combining HPE’s GreenLake and Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software.

The companies said that offering their products together will serve up a hybrid infrastructure fully-managed by HPE, at a lower cost than on-premise solutions. It also offers more flexibility in both customer data centres or a co-location facility.

The offering has been designed for businesses wanting to scale-up their infrastructure to operate mission-critical workloads and big data applications. It supports SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft environments, plus virtualised big data applications, such as Splunk and Hadoop.

The announcement is in response to a problem of overcomplexity from legacy hardware, and concerns over vendor lock-in when attempting to move to a hybrid model, according to the companies.

“HPE created the modern on-premises, as a service consumption market with HPE GreenLake. Hundreds of global customers now leverage HPE GreenLake to get the benefits of a cloud experience combined with the security, governance, and application performance of an on-premises environment, while paying for the service based on actual consumption,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE.

“Today, HPE is expanding its leadership in this market by providing additional choice to customers seeking a hybrid cloud alternative that promises greater agility at lower costs.”

As part of the agreement, Nutanix’s channel partners will gain access to HPE’s servers, giving them the opportunity to sell the hardware alongside Nutanix’s software, offering customers a fully-integrated solution.

“Our customers tell us that it’s their applications that matter most. Our partnership with HPE will provide Nutanix customers with another choice to make their infrastructure invisible so they can focus on business-critical apps, not the underlying technology,” said Dheeraj Pandey, founder, CEO and chairman of Nutanix.

“We are delighted to partner with HPE for the benefit of enterprises looking for the right hybrid cloud solution for their business.”

Google has revealed its Cloud Services Platform has been rebranded to Anthos, a vendor-neutral app development platform that will work in tandem with rival cloud services from Microsoft and AWS.

It was developed as a result of customers wanting a single programming model that gave them the choice and flexibility to move workloads to both Google Cloud and other cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS without any change.

The news was announced during Thomas Kurian’s first keynote speech at a Google Cloud Next event as the company’s new CEO, succeeding Diane Greene’s departure in November last year.

The announcement was met with the loudest cheer of the day from the thousands-strong crowd in attendance who seemed to share the same enthusiasm as the industry analysts who have been trying to convince Google that 88% of businesses will undergo a multi-cloud transformation in the coming years.

That could be some way off though, considering global market intelligence firm IDC said last year less than 10% of organisations are ready for multi-cloud, with most sticking to just one vendor.

Anthos will allow customers to deploy Google Cloud in their own datacentres for a hybrid cloud setup and also allow them to manage workloads within their datacentre, on Google Cloud or other cloud providers in what’s being described as the world’s first true cloud-agnostic setup.

«The only way to reduce risk is by going cloud-agnostic», at least that’s according to Eyal Manor, VP engineering at Anthos. He said that managing hybrid clouds is too complex and challenging, and the reason why as much as 80% of workloads are still not in the cloud.

As it’s entirely software-based and requires no special APIs or time spent learning different environments, Manor said you can install Anthos and start running it in less than 3 hours.

It became generally available Tuesday both on GCP with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and in customers’ datacentres with GKE On-Prem.

The announcement marks Google’s apparent move to make managing infrastructure much simpler for its customers so they can focus on improving their business.

By using Anthos, enterprises can depend on automation so they can «focus on what’s happening further up the stack and take the infrastructure almost for granted», said Manor. «You should be able to deploy new and existing apps running on-premise and in the cloud without constantly having to retrain your developers – you can truly double down on delivering business value».

Some of the world’s leading businesses have been given early access to the platform already such as HSBC which needs a managed cloud platform for its hybrid cloud strategy.

«At HSBC, we needed a consistent platform to deploy both on-premises and in the cloud,» says Darryl West, group CIO, HSBC. «Google Cloud’s software-based approach for managing hybrid environments provided us with an innovative, differentiated solution that was able to be deployed quickly for our customers.»

GCP customers have already invested heavily into their infrastructure, forging relationships with their vendors too which is why Google has launched Anthos with an ecosystem of leading vendors so users can start using the new platform from day one.

Cisco, VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel and Atos are just a few that have committed to delivering Anthos on their own hyperconverged infrastructure for their customers.

Nvidia’s Quadro Virtual Workstation (QvWS) will be available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by the end of the month, marking the first time any platform has supported RTX technology for virtual workstations.

Cloud workloads are becoming increasingly compute-demanding and the support for Nvidia’s QvWS is thought to be able to accelerate the development and deployment of AI services and vastly improve batch rendering from any device in an organisation.

Enterprises which rely on powerful graphics rendering processes would have to invest huge amounts in the hardware needed to perform such compute-heavy tasks on-premise. Using GPU-enabled virtual workstations, businesses can also forget about the cost and complexity of managing datacentres for the task.

Instead of running up to 12 of the T4 GPUs in a business’s on-premise infrastructure, an endeavour that would cost thousands in investment, using the infrastructure-as-a-service via GCP, businesses can spend much less.

«You can spin an instance up [on GCP] for less than $3 per hour,» said Anne Hecht, senior director, product marketing at Nvidia. «The QvWS is about 20 cents per minute and then you need to buy the other infrastructure depending on how much storage, memory and CPU that you want».

That cost can drop during ‘peak times’ in a process called pre-emption, whereby if a customer is willing to lose the service within an hour, for example assigning resources to a workload that will be completed quickly, then it can be rented for half the price.

Edward Richards, director & solution architect at Nvidia, told Cloud Pro that the service can be accessed from any device that can connect to GCP.

«You can plug your own tablet, plug in your mouse of choice, keyboard of choice – you just don’t think about it,» he said. «I use one on my desk at work, I’ve almost chained all my day-to-day to it and every once in a while I forget that I’m actually remoting to it from the other side of the country… it’s just that seamless».

Nvidia is the biggest name in the graphics processing market and its flagship Turing architecture is used in its T4 GPU which can perform real-time graphics-hungry ray tracing, AI and simulation processes. It’s the first time ray tracing has been made available for graphics processing in a cloud instance.

Azure customers can already utilise Nvidia’s graphics processing through VMs, but it only runs on Pascal using its V100 GPU.

The virtual workstations will benefit businesses in more sectors than just games developers. Engineers and car manufacturers run computer-aided design (CAD) applications that are critical to their businesses’ success. Video editors and broadcasters also stand to benefit from high-performance graphics processing while away on set.

«When spikes in production demand occur, particularly around major broadcast events like the Olympics Games or the Soccer World Cup, time and budget to set up new temporary editors are a big problem,» said Alvaro Calandra, consultant at ElCanal.com. «With Quadro vWS on NVIDIA T4 GPUs in the GCP marketplace, I can use critical applications on demand like Adobe Premiere Pro, apply GPU-accelerated effects, stabilise, scale and colour correct clips with a native, workstation-like experience.»

It’s been widely known that Nvidia’s QvWS has been through the alpha and private beta phases in the last few months, but it will be made generally available at the end of the month on GCP.