Cloud Data Management: An Overview

Organisations need to build a strategy for managing the data they send to the cloud, since data security and privacy are important. They must also choose the cloud service provider carefully.

- Phani Kiran

Cloud data management is all about the end-to-end process of managing data in the cloud, right from collection to analytics. It includes managing the type, volume and nature of data in a cloud environment. When organisations use public cloud environments for their enterprise data, they need to have a proper strategy since the data is stored in an external data centre. Public clouds are inherently multi-tenant; hence, security and privacy of the data is important. A good data strategy addresses data in transit and data at rest.

Key aspects of data management in the cloud

Data management in the cloud offers the following benefits. 

• Collection/Ingestion 

• Availability of connectors/APIs that can import data from a variety of sources (databases, files, real-time data, etc). This also includes cleaning the data and handling missing data.

• Integration and transformation 

• Ability to map the data and integrate with other data.

• Storage 

• Ability to store data in the right format in an efficient manner.

• Retrieval 

• Users are able to read/retrieve the data.

• Security 

• Ability to process data in a secured manner for both data at rest and data in transit

• Privacy 

• Ability to mask sensitive data.

• Backup and recovery 

• Ability to provide automated backups and recovery.

• Metadata management