As businesses find themselves dealing with increasingly larger amounts of data, managers need a strategic way to manage the information quickly and efficiently. For many of them, the local data infrastructure is insufficient for working with the influx of information, both in terms of data storage and the speed at which applications can mine the data to find useful connections and new business opportunities.

Instead, these organizations are turning to cloud computing for their enterprise. Forming an enterprise data strategy takes some time and effort and a commitment on management’s part to fully investigate the implications of using cloud computing.

Formulating an Enterprise Data Strategy

Approximately 37 percent of enterprise managers are running or testing private cloud computing and another 26 percent are turning to public cloud computing service providers to help them effectively manage their data, according to a “Enterprise Cloudscapes: Deeper and More Strategic,” a recent survey published by the experts at Unisphere Research.

The number of enterprises using the cloud is expected to reach 51 percent in the next 12 months. Public cloud computing is used for storage as well as on-demand, instant access to software, and private cloud computing is used internally inside enterprises

Part of formulating your data strategy will involve cross-departmental collection and usage of the information. In a loosely structured set of data you don’t have to concern yourself with predicting exactly how the data must be entered and sorted. This is particularly useful when you are sourcing some of your data from large amounts of text, such as from social media or your marketing department’s customer service outreach campaigns.

Realizing the Benefits of Cloud Computing
When you take advantage of cloud computing in your enterprise, you will no longer need to require your best and brightest employees to work out of headquarters. This can also enable your top team members to be able work together in a collaborative fashion from disparate remote locations as seamlessly as if they were in the same office. What’s more, if you are working on tight deadlines, you may need to harness the power of workers in different time zones for maximum uptime, which cloud computing will easily facilitate.

For long-term cloud computing requirements, AWS could be a top choice for businesses as it tends to provide cost-effective cloud computing solutions and helps companies with different workloads like data processing, warehousing, game development, and many more to ultimately aid in their growth. You could hire any firms that offer a full suite of managed cloud services like Logicata, for example, to ensure the performance of your applications and the optimization of your cloud requirements. However, if your organization may need to use a particular application for a short period, such as a month-long project in which you test out a new data mining process to help you formulate a marketing campaign to your under-performing clients or customers.

In that case, instead of your company having to spend a significant amount of money on software and site licenses as you add more employees to the short-term project, you can use cloud computing services known as Software as a Service (SaaS). In essence, you are only required to only pay for the software for the time you need to use it or test it.

Once your project is finished, you can evaluate the results and make a determination about purchasing the application for permanent use in your location, or simply opt to rent the use of the software the next time you need to use it later in the year.

Another benefit of cloud computing in the enterprise is the ability to store increasingly larger amounts of data off-site. This makes projecting your IT budget and data infrastructure needs much easier, as you don’t have to worry about buying local servers. Instead, you purchase additional virtual storage space in the cloud, as well as additional computational capacity on an as-needed basis. Proper data storage and data management can keep the enterprise data organized. The data warehousing process can collect and manage data from different sources to give business insights. The data warehouse structure also meets the need for storing structured, filtered data required for a defined purpose.

Once your company has determined that it will be beneficial to apply cloud computing technology to managing all your data, your managers and employees will need to spend some time learning how to work with the new system. In the long run, however, this will be time well spent, as cloud computing is going to allow you to organize your data and work on it in a collaborative fashion. Being able to manage enormous sets of data quickly and efficiently is key to remaining competitive in today’s economic landscape.

Author Bio: Matt Smith is a Dell employee who writes to help raise awareness on the topic of Cloud Computing and other network management subjects.