Data is the lifeblood to many modern businesses. Data helps businesses make better decisions, predict sales trends, find new customers and increase retention of existing ones, better understand performance, and improve processes. That’s just scraping the surface of what data — and data analytics — can achieve. In short, data helps businesses better understand their customers and what it is that they are doing. This is where the likes of Silk can help.
However, not every company maximizes the value of its data as much as they could — with cloud-based solutions proving particularly problematic. Poor data management practices can hurt productivity and efficiency. Suboptimal data management can have a variety of negative consequences, ranging from the inconvenient (running out of storage capacity) to the potentially disastrous (exposing organizational and customer data to risk.)
Negatively impacting customers
This can negatively impact companies in a number of ways. For example, a disorganized approach to data management can mean that too much time is spent trying to remedy what’s broken, rather than focusing on productivity. As a result, big data projects can fail. In addition, it could lead to possible data breaches, which may result in regulatory fines, identity theft, and damaged reputation with customers.
That’s just scraping the surface of what data — and advanced data analytics — can achieve. In short, data helps businesses better understand their customers and what it is that they are doing. This is where the likes of Silk can help.
The cloud has been a game-changer for companies. But infrastructure-dependent data storage can hurt businesses. Consider, for example, vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in refers to proprietary measures that make customers dependent on a particular vendor for services and products, making it difficult to switch to another vendor without incurring some major costs. These proprietary setups are good for companies, but not necessarily quite so positive for customers — for such reasons as making agile development more challenging when locked into particular infrastructures.
Vendor lock-in is made more problematic by the fact that, in many cases, providers don’t offer features, optimizations, and customization options like deduplication (the elimination of duplicate or redundant information), compression, data replication, thin provisioning, and zero-footprint clones, among other measures which might help clients to reduce their data costs. They may also not provide the best security measures.
Ask the right questions of providers
Those who rely on the cloud for their data solutions should make sure to assess their providers to ensure that they offer what is needed. For instance, does the provider offer the security features needed? Also, how does application performance measure up? Performance problems can result in lengthy wait times and unstable performance. It’s important to look at questions like how applications share data with one another, and whether duplicate datasets are required? Do applications run well on platforms where data management is optimized?
The answer to many of these challenges is to make sure that you employ a cloud data platform that can decouple data from underlying infrastructure. In doing so, it makes it easier to move data between different environments, granting users full control over the components they choose to migrate. This is possible while still providing the full functionality and public cloud benefits you would expect from being cloud native.
There are multiple benefits to decoupling data from infrastructure — including cost reductions by discontinuing the use of legacy systems and only paying for cloud performance you need, enjoying a faster time to market, greater flexibility when it comes to switching vendors, optimizing spending and cost structure, and more.
Built from the ground-up to help
Silk was designed from the ground-up to be a more cost-effective, flexible data management solution than others available on the market. It offers a number of features that are designed to make cloud solutions smarter, offering flexible and on-demand scaling, improved performance for databases in the cloud, and significantly reduced costs. Using Silk’s Flex Dashboard, users are in total control of their cloud data — including the features, performance, and data used. It allows customers to reduce size and costs associated with cloud data using the likes of deduplication and compression, in addition to improved cloud security, courtesy of replication, encryption, and zero-footprint clones. Finally, it makes it easier than ever to connect clouds across platforms.
The dream of cloud-based computing is for a world in which data can freely move between apps, databases, and data structures. At its best, cloud-based solutions can result in a significant performance boost, while offering maximum flexibility. This is what Silk does by supercharging and orchestrating databases, thereby making it easier to allow data to move smoothly and frictionlessly wherever it’s needed to go.