Data Warehouse as a Hybrid Cloud Service

With a data warehouse as a hybrid cloud service, users can take advantage of the cloud without having to move large, sometimes sensitive data to the cloud. There are lot of companies who are trying to scale their data solutions to meet growing or fluctuating demands. According to Gartner, growth of public cloud is expected to rise sharply to $411 billion by 2020. Some of the companies see their future through in-memory database platform, like SAP HANA in the cloud. The accelerated migration of enterprise processes to the cloud is driven by the desire of users to reduce costs, improve agility, increase efficiency, and exit the self-responsible infrastructure management business. At the same time, one would like to test modern technologies, such as machine learning or big-data analytics faster than prototypes or take them directly into production. Recently, historical reluctance to relocate business-critical applications or sensitive data about security, compliance, and strategy/management concerns to the cloud also appears to be easing.

The in-memory database platform and the cloud played a prominent role in the recent progress in data warehouse. From Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the Google Cloud platform, all major cloud infrastructure providers are used with platforms like SAP HANA cloud services. As with any as-a-Service offering, this approach eliminates much of the administrative burden on the in-memory database. The key components of SAP’s Cloud Data Services strategy include:

1. Distributed data sources for real-time access;
2. Data Warehouse Cloud;
3. Linking unstructured data to the analytics platform;
4. Integration with OpenText like formats for unstructured content;
5. Robotic Process Automation;
6. Integration with Internet of Things services;

The SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is a new data warehouse solution that enables organizations to leverage all of the advanced features of SAP HANA without the massive up-front costs associated with data warehouse implementations.

In case of integration with hybrid cloud, the user has the choice whether the data should be moved to the cloud (by a data replication) or whether the data in the existing systems should be accessed. This approach enables the company to find its own balance between on-premise and cloud delivery. For example, a company with large local databases does not need to completely move it to the cloud.

Business users can extend their existing on-premises data (in on-premise systems) with their own data in the cloud (from previously non-integrated systems). Alternatively, IT can build new scenarios in the cloud that are based on or in combination with local data, enabling a timely evolution to a full-fledged cloud data warehouse.

The data warehouse cloud addresses the issues of elasticity and scalability with a new concept which makes it possible to scale the individual areas of the data warehouse or data mart independently of each other instead of building huge monolithic systems. The connection with flexible and independently rentable spaces allows contingent control of how much computing and storage capacity a defined set of users, typically a single business unit, can consume. A durable, sophisticated Data Mart solution ensures that neither the knowledge nor the time required for the technical equipment required to operate such an architecture must be available to end users. As a result, the business can focus on extracting value from the data rather than focusing on these operational tasks. When using a cloud platform, there are some challenges such as licensing, access control, preventing downtime and the transfer costs.