The Benefits Of A Cloud Data Platform

Just like peanut butter goes with jelly, and karaoke goes with embarrassment, marketers dealing with big data and cloud data platforms are the latest in a long line of perfect pairings. But like all relationships, there is a lot of groundwork that needs to be handled before the benefits of a cloud data partnership become evident. In this blog, we’ll talk about how cloud data platforms operate, when and where marketers should employ them, and what ways your team can leverage the power within them. 

What is a cloud data platform?

We’ve heard about lakes, marketing data pipelines, warehouses, and databases, but cloud data platforms have been on the horizon for a while now. Depending on your situation, the need for a data cloud platform might be hovering directly overhead your marketing team. 

Cloud data platforms enable organizations to move their data and applications to the cloud, and transition away from on-premise and traditional data warehouses. These platforms offer a unified solution that can handle multi-cloud environments, giving users more control over their data ecosystem. Organizations looking to reduce cost and drive innovation can benefit from the scalability and flexibility of cloud data platforms.

To get the most from your cloud data platform, customers should be looking for an integrated solution that is easy to start, easy to operate and secure, and easy to analyze.

What are the benefits of a cloud data platform?

Cloud data platforms offer a range of advantages to any business. 

• Rapidly ingest both structured and unstructured data, allowing for more powerful analytics than ever before.
  
  
• Companies can scale quickly and easily as their needs evolve, enabling them to create a data lake. This makes it easier to share information with both on-site and remote employees.
  
  
• Businesses benefit from reduced IT costs by replacing capital expenses (CAPEX) with operating expenses (OPEX), while virtually eliminating the need for equipment downtime due to maintenance, damage, or theft.
  
  
• Cloud data platforms also allow businesses to rethink their data processes and privacy policies.

A cloud data platform offers a simplified and unified way of accessing, managing, visualizing, and processing data. The platform provides access to insights gained from disparate sources and enables users to collaborate across departments more effectively. It also offers role-based permissions, so data scientists, business users, data stewards, developers, and administrators can individually access the information they need in a secure manner. A single platform boosts efficiency for technical due diligence, user adoption, and collaboration as well as helping streamline infrastructure management.

Challenges and considerations in cloud data platforms

While cloud data platforms offer numerous benefits, there are also challenges and considerations that businesses need to address when adopting these platforms. Some of the key challenges include:

Data migration: Moving data from on-premises systems to the cloud can be a complex and time-consuming process. Businesses need to ensure a smooth and secure migration of their data to avoid any potential data loss or disruption.

Data privacy and compliance: Cloud data platforms store data in a shared environment, which raises concerns about data privacy and compliance. Businesses need to ensure that their data is protected and compliant with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Vendor lock-in: Choosing a cloud data platform vendor requires careful consideration. Businesses need to evaluate the vendor's reliability, scalability, security, and pricing models to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure long-term flexibility.

Data governance and control: With data residing in the cloud, businesses need to have robust data governance policies and controls in place to ensure data integrity, security, and compliance. This includes defining access controls, data retention policies, and data sharing agreements.

Cost management: While cloud data platforms offer cost savings, businesses need to carefully manage their usage to avoid unexpected costs. This involves optimizing resource allocation, monitoring usage, and implementing cost management strategies.

Examples of cloud data platforms

Cloud data platforms are quickly becoming a necessity for marketing teams looking to scale their capabilities. There are several companies that offer cloud data platform solutions, including but not limited to:

• Snowflake
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud Platform

While these big names should be of no surprise, there are other companies that offer similar cloud-based services that specifically focus on marketing, such as Salesforce, Airbyte, and NinjaCat. 

A major challenge for marketers looking to scale their analytics capabilities who don’t have a centralized cloud data platform is the dreaded Frankenstack. A Frankenstack is what occurs when marketing teams cobble together a bunch of point solutions to try to get the data they need, and end up a messy, sometimes unusable data infrastructure.

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The problems with Frankenstacks are many, but the chief concerns are that this approach requires data engineers, it’s hard to scale, difficult to learn, the security, accuracy, and governance of the data are questionable, data models are scattered, and most importantly Frankenstacks are fragile and expensive.

Instead of a reliable way to ingest and transform data in a centralized capacity, Frankenstacks are less foundational and more Faberge Egg. What if there was a better way? 

How NinjaCat functions as a cloud data platform

NinjaCat’s approach is to provide teams an all-in-one cloud data platform to store, report, monitor, analyze, and act on marketing data at scale. For brands, agencies, and media companies, a data cloud platform like NinjaCat can free them from Frankenstacks and address their data pain points, which include:

• 100’s of siloed marketing sources
• Complex data models
• Cobbled together point solutions (“stacks”)
• Aggregating and wrangling data
• Inability to meet complex customer needs
• Difficulties to scale across clients or multi-locations
• Reports that look like data vomit, not insightful stories

A key aspect of NinjaCat’s total Data Cloud functionality is that it can centralize your marketing data into a fully managed enterprise data warehouse. The engine behind NinjaCat’s data cloud allows for hundreds of marketing data integrations and custom connections. With automatic data modeling, teams can normalize diverse digital platform data into a common marketing data model. Check out our marketing data management product page for more information.

Future trends in data management and the role of cloud data platforms

As businesses continue to accumulate vast amounts of data, the future of data management will be driven by emerging trends and technologies. One such trend is the rise of edge computing, where data processing and analytics are performed closer to the data source. This enables real-time insights and reduces latency, especially in industries such as IoT, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities. Cloud data platforms will play a crucial role in integrating and analyzing data from edge devices and providing a centralized view of the data.

Another trend is the increasing adoption of hybrid cloud architectures, where businesses leverage a combination of public and private clouds to store and manage their data. Hybrid cloud environments offer the flexibility to keep sensitive data on-premises while leveraging the scalability and cost benefits of public cloud platforms. Cloud data platforms will need to adapt to support hybrid cloud architectures and provide seamless data integration and management across different environments.

The potential to scale and grow your book of business through better data management starts with blowing up your Frankenstack and replacing it with a reliable cloud data platform. If you’re interested in learning how NinjaCat can be your single source of truth for your marketing data, get in touch with us or book a demo.