In today’s data-driven business landscape, a cloud data warehouse can help remove barriers to gaining actionable insights, by centralizing data for real-time access. Despite widespread adoption, however, there are misconceptions about its role in analytics and the value it provides to an organization. Let’s debunk five of those misconceptions.
#1: You need massive amounts of data
While a cloud data warehouse is optimal for storing and maintaining big data, its benefits are not reserved for companies with large data footprints. Businesses with smaller volumes benefit through easy access to usable, quality data needed for accurate reporting and informed decision-making across the organization. Alternative approaches such as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools and on-premises hardware can be too costly for converting unstructured, non-standard, and incomplete data into a usable form. A cloud data warehouse operates more efficiently by using automation to integrate with sources and then validate, clean, and transform data. It creates a single, real-time source for quality data and scales as business needs expand.
#2: A good BI tool is sufficient for today’s analytics needs
Contextual insights help improve decision-making by providing the reasons behind trends in areas such as finance, sales, and the supply chain. But the business intelligence (BI) process becomes tricky when uploading diverse datasets from multiple sources and bringing them together for analysis. Query response can slow as the system struggles to process multiple datasets for use cases such as historical trend analysis. A cloud data warehouse can help improve query performance by providing preprocessed and organized data that’s faster to access, blend, and query. This enables the BI tool to perform complex analyses at greater speed. Pairing a cloud data warehouse with a BI tool can boost the analytics process to harness greater potential from your data collections.
#3: There’s a lack of data security and protections
Businesses managing sensitive data, including those in the healthcare and financial services industries, have adopted cloud data warehouses not only for efficiency and scalability but also for its robust security practices, which can be expensive to replicate in-house. Leading cloud providers help businesses drive compliance with industry regulations through features including an advanced security infrastructure with intrusion detection, access controls, and encryption; data redundancy and recovery safeguards; and monitoring to support faster threat detection. Data protection and privacy can be managed at the user role level to help prevent verified users from accessing information beyond their defined job needs.
#4: It’s difficult to achieve high ROI
Real-time access to centralized business data with a cloud data warehouse helps generate ROI from increased data utilization, and better communication and collaboration across departments since everyone is working off the same, verified information. It also provides a solution that can level the playing field between an emerging business and industry giant as they each leverage AI analytics for robust insights that help solve business challenges, optimize processes, and predict potential areas of risk.
#5: All cloud data warehouses are the same
There are distinct differences between cloud data warehouse offerings. Some providers may set a fixed monthly rate, while others charge for computing resources used per month. Some offer an “as-a-service” model with prebuilt functionality that’s simple to deploy, while others require significant ETL setup, customization, and in-house expertise to maintain. Other important points of differentiation include interoperability, intuitive interface, and how the architecture fits your needs regarding powerful analytics capabilities versus high-volume data storage.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is an AI-powered cloud data warehouse and advanced analytics solution that packages Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse with Oracle Analytics Cloud for NetSuite. It centralizes NetSuite ERP and other business systems’ data for real-time access and enables users to easily drag and drop datasets to build reports and visualizations. Business users can leverage its robust AI-powered analytics to help improve operational efficiency, predict the likelihood of risk, and discover revenue opportunities.
