Why Small Businesses Should Keep Their Eye On Cloud Data Platforms
Value Area: Data Science
You’re thinking Cloud Computing is mainly for enterprise organizations….
Not so fast….
Paradigms are changing faster than you think…
Slow down, get a cup of coffee, and let’s hash this thing out.
Most people go with what they know. When it comes to computing, small businesses tend to be minimalists. On the other hand, everyone wants to put their investments and resources to best use. This would be a good time to begin thinking outside the box.
Motivations Why You Might Want to Reconsider your Computing Needs and Architecture
There are many good reasons why small and medium companies are starting to become interested in cloud computing options. It’s no secret that creating an on-premise IT infrastructure comes with its own set of headaches. All you need is to have experienced the pain of one cyberattack or malware attack to know that for weeks afterward, your working with limited functionality and limited access to key data sources while your IT people root out all the consequences of the attack. Furthermore, If you have ever survived a hard drive crash of a major system, you’ll know what pain is. To add to the misery, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your whole system keeps climbing. Are you really happy with the level of investment required to keep your computing activities functional? Could you have put this capitol to better use?
What could have been done different?
Key Drivers
The computing market space is no longer one size fits all, or 3 sizes fit 3 types of organizations. The main players in this space, such as AWS, Google, IBM, and Snowflake have all become agile and can create systems that uniquely meet the demand of every client.
Cloud Data Platforms tailor their offerings to bring real benefit to every business:
Small Monthly fees vs. Large Upfront Investments - Cloud computing pricing is typically structured on a use time and data download rate. For typical small companies, a small annuity is typically much more attractive than upfront investments.
Instant and Infinite Scalability - As your data needs change, the data architecture is in an elastic environment to match the data needs
Access to New Analytic Methods - adopting Cloud Data Platforms is conducive to creating Data warehouses (for structured data) and Data lakes (for semistructured data) to support analytics. Emerging analytics methods for Business Intelligence (BI), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged by analytics to provide insights into business patterns and data streams for more informed decisions.
Processing Parallel Workloads - depending on the kind of analyses employed., processings times may become a bottleneck. Cloud platforms can deploy parallel workloads computed simultaneously to open the bottleneck. Expanding processing power can be dynamically configured for the time to run the analyses and then dynamically reduced.
Governance, Security, and Control - Cloud Platforms are structured with world-class levels of security and governance, making the platform more secure and stable than most on-premise networks
Compliance - Cloud Platforms meet needed compliance standards for HIPPA and other regulations, removing the burden of small businesses to provide their own certifications.
Small Business Data Applications are Pipeline Candidates
Growing computing needs is a global phenomenon. Small businesses are beginning to be affected, just as larger, enterprise businesses are. A reasonably good estimate for computing costs is ~$8/GB. This would apply to companies of all sizes. From this simple estimate, we see that small businesses will need to budget resources toward computing based on the volume of data created. The volume of small business data is growing exponentially. Even small business is creating terabytes of data. Sources of small business data are also growing:
Streaming Data - such as log data, social media data, and IoT data
Traditional Data Sources - ERP, CRM, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems
eCommerce Data - order fulfillment Data, Revenue, and inventory forecasting.
These data sources are strategic assets of any company to be mined for competitive advantage and increased efficiencies. On Cloud Data Platforms, Data pipelines are created to transfer data (realtime or static) to large data containers. Data pipelines seamlessly copy data to a Data lake
Pipelines to Cloud Platforms
Working with Data Lakes
In the newly emerging Cloud paradigm, the real work begins in Data lakes. The goal is to gain insight from data and automate the rapid sharing of insights gained from the data. The sheer amount of data along with the schema of the data is beyond the ability of human observation to extract value. New methods must be used to extract the “gold” residing in the data. Advanced data techniques are used to begin the process. It is important to engage data scientist with proven business experience. Dvanced techniques are strengthen when coupled with sound business intuiation.
Data Exploration - categorization, clustering, correlation analysis
Interactive Data Analysis - selective time series slicing based on user need
Event-Driven Analytics - monitoring data streams for event triggers
The payoff for small business comes in the form of unique insights and visualizations. The interpretation of data is shifting. Most insights come along with a statistical component, ie “in the course of quarter, 70% of our client behave in a certain pattern, but that is increased by 13% over 3 day holiday ends”.
Conclusion
Tomorrow business leaders will be able to absorb imprecisely, but descriptive information to form business decisions in a rapidly changing landscape. The time periods of reviewed time-series data such as sales forcasting and inventory levels will shorten and the volume of SKUs will likely increase. This shift will require different strategic decisions and skillsets. The shift will also require new tools and system architectures. The trend of B2B commerce will become more technology intense, which small businesses will need to adjust to. Modern solutions offer cost advantages as well as non-quantifiable advantages which can not be ignored in planning small business success
Informed Decisions. Better Solutions
Stillwater Group LLC can create the analytics to meet the specific needs of your business
Visit Us At
or schedule an appointment at: