If that wasn’t enough, storing data in your own data center doesn’t necessarily make it safe. Even if a physical disaster never strikes, poor data security measures could leave the door open for hackers to walk off with all your sensitive data. In addition, maintaining the latest security updates can be time-consuming.
As cloud services have evolved and matured, they have become compelling solutions to all the shortcomings and challenges of on-premise data centers.
It turns out talking about migrating enterprise data to the cloud is one thing…getting it there is quite another. Depending on the size and complexity of a data environment, a cloud migration project could require several months of planning and preparation, including:
…and finally, transferring the data to the cloud.
You can’t just drag-and-drop 20 terabytes to a cloud service. Several approaches must be considered for this task. Some of these considerations are simplified by a new entrant in the cloud database market: Snowflake.
Snowflake is a cloud-based database platform-as-a-service provider that offers some compelling advantages over on-premise and other cloud database solutions:
Snowflake also supports a data-sharing program that enables different companies (think customers, vendors, distributors, and other partners) to share data with each other without making copies or transfers.
However, Snowflake is not a general-purpose database platform. It is intended for data warehousing and similar data summarization and aggregation, such as data lakes and is less suitable for day-to-day operational transaction data.
The good news is, if your transactional data is also in the cloud, getting the summarized data into Snowflake is easy. Snowflake works within and between different cloud providers.
Another nice feature of Snowflake is its technical support, which has published numerous guides to migrating data from various platforms to Snowflake. Several migration tools are available to simplify the process even further.
You’re still in for a long project if you have a complex data landscape. But many of the excruciating technical tasks can be simplified or eliminated. You’re left to focus on the business and application tasks, such as data cleansing, application updates, and the like.
Snowflake was designed from the ground up as a cloud database platform, not simply an on-premise platform deployed in the cloud. That means its architecture is optimized to leverage the unique advantages of cloud computing, such as automatic resource scaling.
This approach also simplifies data migration because the underlying cloud architecture—which is always tricky to set up, especially for cloud technology newcomers—is already set up and optimized for performance, reliability, and security.
Snowflake offers a compelling choice in cloud-based database platforms. Many well-known companies are Snowflake customers. At AndPlus, we are following Snowflake with keen interest so we can help you evaluate whether Snowflake is the right choice for your own cloud data migration.