Chapter 11

Managing and Integrating Data

In This Chapter

Ensuring trustworthy data

Integrating data across environments

Managing big data in the cloud

Supporting an analytics strategy

T here’s no way around it: The issues surrounding data in the cloud are a big and complicated topic. The reality is that data is the lifeblood of your business. Therefore, the way you manage data, regardless of where it lives, is critical to the health of your company. This data comes in all shapes and sizes. There may be transactional data, customer data, and various kinds of unstructured data, such as documents and images. Your data might be massive in terms of sheer volume. Or it might be coming at you in real time. You may want to use this data for analysis or to provide other business value.

Being able to manage this data and ensure that it’s trustworthy is a critical issue in hybrid cloud environments. Depending on the sensitivity of your data and your business requirements, some of this data can be stored on your premises and integrated with a private cloud, whereas other data sources that may not be as sensitive can be stored in a public cloud. Some of it may never leave your premises. There are numerous points to consider, however, and we dive into those in this chapter.

Additionally, in a hybrid world, there can be multiple touchpoints between your data and the cloud. That is why integration is so important in data management. Your data may be on-premises, but integrated with multiple applications in the cloud. Both the integrity of your information and the ability to incorporate cloud-based business services into your company’s overall business processes are at great risk unless you can consistently integrate across your hybrid environment. So, in this chapter, we also describe the requirements for integrating across those platforms.