Do you wonder how OTT giant Netflix understands your preference and showcases only the suggestion that you end up watching? The answer to this question lies in data analytics.
The secret of the company to rise within a short span of time is its capability to use a large amount of data in a strategic manner. They collect the data of their users like their watching patterns, streaming history, their behaviour, etc., and suggest to their viewers the next movie or web series they should try.
Now, a question arises, where does Netflix keep all the terabytes and petabytes of data?
And here comes Salesforce cloud-based data warehouse.
What is Data Warehousing?
To understand cloud-based database warehousing, it is essential to first talk briefly about data warehousing in general. A warehouse is a place where one keeps its stock, and the place where businesses keep data is a data warehouse.
It is a place where businesses put a large amount of information. A database stores the information, and a warehouse makes the information available to all authorized users to conduct in-depth analysis and prepare detailed reporting.
Businesses use the stored data, process it, and use it in elevating its different operations such as sales, operations, marketing, production, demand, supply, etc.
In a data warehouse, one can find hundreds and thousands of sources in a consolidated manner, and users can easily convert data into information. For scalability and security, companies are more inclined towards cloud-based data warehouses.
What is a Cloud-Based Data Warehouse?
Keeping a huge chunk of data, which generates every day, is a daunting task with an on-premise warehousing system. It is costly and requires lots of manual effort to maintain.
According to a report by Cloud Tweaks, “data-related problems cost the majority of companies more than $5 million every year and cost 20% of companies more than $20 million annually.
Another report by Lemonly reveals that businesses lose as much as 25% of the revenue in the absence of properly-used data.
And to keep businesses operating up and running in a streamlined manner, comes cloud-based data warehousing. It helps businesses to strengthen their core functionalities such as sales, marketing, product development, support & services, and other tasks.
The Cloud-based data warehouses are highly scalable and can handle a humongous amount of data without any technical jargon. Users can access data from anywhere and anytime.
Seeing the importance of cloud-based data warehouses, many major companies have started investing a huge sum in its integration.
As per a report by Salesforce 89% of businesses are investing a substantial amount in data and data analytics.
Some of the most popular cloud-based data warehouses include names such as Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake DB.
Top Benefits of Cloud Data Warehouse
Lower Costing
One of the most important benefits of using a cloud data warehouse is the low cost associated with it. You must be using an on-premise data warehouse, but even you know that they require expensive hardware, time-consuming upgrades, and regular maintenance to keep business up and running. And with an increase in the amount of data, the on-premise data warehouse becomes costlier and costlier.
On the contrary, with cloud-based data warehouses, there is no such problem. Businesses can use and access a large amount of data without worrying about space and time. The presence of cloud data warehouses lessens the cost incurred on business intelligence.
Improved Speed & Performance
In the present epoch, one of the challenging tasks that businesses have to handle every day is the management of data that drives from multiple sources. With cloud data warehouses, it becomes easy for users to keep up with growing data resources. Cloud-based data warehouses are fast and reliable, and they can handle multiple data streams with efficient velocity.
The cloud data warehouse empowers businesses to make result-driven decisions. It also streamlines the process of integrating Salesforce CRM with ERP, social media, support & services, marketing cloud, and other platforms, all while maintaining speed and performance.
There are multiple servers that tag along with cloud data warehouses, they help maintain data load and improve processing speeds.
- With multiple servers, cloud data warehouses can simultaneously be accessible from different geographies with no hassle.
- Cloud data warehouses can get integrated with new data sources as required.
- They increase the speed & performance of business operations & help achieve excellence.
Self-Service Capabilities
The cloud data warehouses bring self-service capabilities of data analysis for businesses. Prior to the advent of cloud-based data warehouses, it was challenging for the key business people to get full visibility into key information and make evidence-based decisions.
Cloud data warehouses bring self-reliance for businesses. It lets businesses leverage resource pooling, computing power, storage, and networks. It has no problems like storage limits and lower processing power.
Irrespective of geographical distances, stakeholders can raise ad hoc queries on the same dataset and empower users to make informed decisions for every aspect of businesses.
Robust Security
Prior to the advent of the cloud data warehouse, businesses considered on-premise data warehouses secure and reliable. But as time evolves, technology also evolves and cloud-based data warehouses come into being.
Companies started recognizing the power of the cloud data warehouses, they found them more secure and more cost-effective.
The cloud-based data warehouse does not require a full-time team to maintain and oversee the database. It mitigates the challenges of human errors. The databases are stored over the cloud; therefore, there is no hurdle of maintaining multiple systems, unlike on-premise warehouses.
- Tracking and monitoring the flow of data is easy in a cloud-based system.
- Data is more secured over the cloud platform.
- Cloud platform offers multi-factor authentication that makes cloud warehouse, a highly encrypted platform.
- Easy to transfer data across regions and resources with the highest security possible.
More Storage
In the previous time, it was quite challenging for companies to estimate the storage needs. For that, they had to compute the requirements up to three years in advance.
It was a time-consuming task and required lots of effort and cost.
On the contrary, cloud-based data warehouses were brilliant in their storage capacity. Companies do not have to worry about the cost of storage with the data warehouses on the cloud.
One of the best parts of a cloud data warehouse is its pay-as-you-go model, wherein a company has the liberty to increase or decrease its subscription as per its requirements.
It is easy for the data warehouse engineers to optimally use the cluster size, CPU, and RAM as per the need of the projects, all thanks to the agility & flexibility of cloud technology. It empowers developers to make changes quickly without negatively affecting the budget or architecture of a business.
Access & Integration
Using a cloud data warehouse brings an improved level of accessibility and integration. These data warehouses have built-in data governance; it means that a user in a company can be added to a specific group to perform specific actions like analysis, visualization, etc.
Cloud data warehouses accommodate multiple data types like structured data, unstructured data etc., and empowers companies to keep in use a diverse range of developers.
Cloud-based data warehouses offer an excellent integration facility. Database admins can easily integrate multiple data sources without any problem. The cloud warehouses are flexible enough to let users use the warehousing apps and strict enough to maintain the integrity of data.
High Recoverability
Collecting a large amount of data is a tedious task. What’s more challenging is, if the data gets lost, it will become a highly risky and costly affair for businesses to recover it. In the traditional way, companies used to keep duplicate or backup data in order to overcome such a situation.
With a cloud-based data warehouse, there is no such problem. Companies, with the help of data backup, can easily recover data without having to worry about physical equipment.
The data in the cloud data warehouse performs consistent snapshots and does consistent backups in an automated manner. So it will be easy for users to obtain the data or recover it without affecting the current work.
Is There a Salesforce Data Warehouse?
In the present time, almost every business is implementing a data warehouse as a single source of truth for easy operations. Integration of data warehouse with Salesforce will accelerate the functionality & usability of the Salesforce data. The integration makes the business data aligned to overall organizational goals.
Here are the top benefits of Salesforce CRM and data warehouse integrations:
- Invoice research becomes time-effective.
- Sales reps can close the deals rapidly.
- Comparisons of data become easy.
- It will be easy to generate a report in no time.
- Easy to obtain and analyze critical performance reports.
- Discover & analyze detailed activities of customers.
- Effective and precise forecasting.
- Easy report generation.
