MIS 3406 Project
The Interplay Between Big Data and Cloud Computing
With the rise of big data and business intelligence, data-oriented decision making is becoming one of the hottest paradigms in the business world today. But, as the droves of data businesses process grow by the day, the demand for scalable, flexible, and integrated supportive infrastructure is skyrocketing. This is where cloud computing comes in. Cloud computing provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure, allowing businesses to provision up or down cloud resources as needed. Furthermore, the cloud enhances interconnectivity and collaboration within a firm, providing employees with heightened access to business intelligence and pertinent data. The insights big data provides are already immense, but these returns can be compounded as the cloud provides the most efficient and interconnected playground for data and employees to interact.
While it doesn’t take much to convince tech leads and industry experts that the cost of migrating to the cloud is easily dwarfed by its benefits, it’s much harder to convince upper management and shareholders to actually implement systematic shifts to new technologies and workflows. Yet, as data is becoming akin to digital gold these days, managers and executives are becoming more convinced of the benefits of cloud technology. In the rapidly expanding industry of data harvesting, analysis, and visualization, it is particularly simple to communicate the business value of the cloud and virtualization. For executives and managers of companies that oversee large amounts of data, the cloud essentially eliminates the large capital expenditure that was once imperative for establishing a robust on-premise IT infrastructure. This makes taking small ideas and scaling easy, simple, and accessible for firms that may lack the large amount of funding required to provision onsight infrastructure. Beyond the savings in the initial capital expenditure, the cloud also eliminates the high variable costs associated with on-premise infrastructures such as energy, maintenance, and hardware upgrades.
Cloud also streamlines scalability as providers allow users and businesses to provision resources up or down according to demand or preference. Removing the need to focus on availability and redundancy of resources, cloud service providers allow managers and tech leads to focus on product development and innovation. With data, security and availability are paramount. By utilizing the cloud, businesses can ensure maximum flexibility and control over their data security, storage and organization, and availability and user access. By removing all of the barriers that inhibit data-oriented firms from focusing on deriving insights, the cloud allows businesses to more efficiently allocate resources, ensure data security and availability, and streamline scalability.
In MIS 3406, students learn how to design and build information technology infrastructures and deploy scalable applications in the cloud. At the root of these systems, is developing business logic to accept, handle, analyze, manipulate, and display data through and in the cloud. In the course, students learn how to secure different aspects of your application based on desired accessibility. Furthermore, we build on our skills from MIS 2502 by provisioning and interacting with a SQL database through Amazon Web Services’ RDS. These concepts of cloud data storage, infrastructure scaling, and cloud application availability and redundancy are all foundational for understanding the cloud-oriented future of big data processing and analysis.
Big data and cloud computing are already being used together to provide greater business value, improve processes, and provide unforeseen insight. One company based in Santa Monica, California, DataHero, integrates cloud-based business intelligence tools into existing workflows, providing clients with integrative data dashboards and visualization tools. DataHero integrates with existing workflows to identify KPIs and provide unique insights into performance. Because DataHero utilizes the cloud, it is easily scalable and integrates with a wide array of technologies and services, including Mailchimp, Excel, and ZenDesk.
References
Chan, M., 10, M., 20, K., & *, N. (2018, September 10). Big Data in the Cloud: Why Cloud Computing is the Answer to Your Big Data Initiatives. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://www.thorntech.com/2018/09/big-data-in-the-cloud/
Daley, S. (n.d.). Information innovation: 14 companies harnessing the combined power of big data and cloud computing. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://builtin.com/big-data/big-data-cloud-computing