Building Data Architecture for the Cloud

Five Essential Tips While Building Data Architecture for the Cloud

Building for the Cloud, don't miss out on these essential tips

Cloud computing has become an integral part of business today. It stores large amounts of data and runs complex analytics on those datasets. However, building a data architecture that can store and serve high volumes of data in the Cloud requires careful planning.

The challenges of big data in software architecture are related to scale, security, integrity, performance, concurrency, parallelism, and dependability, among other critical factors. Handling big data demands a complete rethinking of architectural solutions to effectively address functional and non-functional volume, variety, and velocity requirements.

This blog post from our team puts across the five best practices for building a cloud-based data architecture that scales efficiently and provides security and ease of use for your business users.

1 Consider your business needs.

Before you embark on building your data architecture, it's crucial to understand the business problems you're trying to solve. This understanding will help you determine what data you want to store, how to access it, and how your company will manage it.

You need to know what data you want to store, how to access it, and how your company will manage it.

2 Anticipate data growth

As you design for the Cloud, keep the future in mind. You must anticipate and plan for future needs. Once you have your data architecture in place, it will be vital to predict new applications and data sources that may need to be added. Your goal should be to get a baseline of how much additional storage or processing power will be needed in the future and whether changes are required at all levels of your architecture, including hardware and software upgrades. A good rule of thumb is that every doubling of users requires an additional one-fourth increase in performance (or "scaling factor").

3 Design for scale

Architecting your data architecture for the Cloud should be considered a continuous process. First, you must design for scale, considering your environment's elasticity and capacity planning. This includes considering data growth and how to scale your architecture over time. Consider how you can scale resources as needed to meet demand.

In addition, when designing for scalability, think about whether any bottlenecks limit performance at peak times—and then plan so that when those times come around again next year or next quarter, they won't cause problems!

4 Think of security from the ground up

Security is another critical aspect of cloud design. You need to think about security from the ground up. Considering the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, it is crucial to uphold security best practices throughout the design process, infrastructure deployment, and day-to-day operations. This helps to fortify against vulnerabilities and also ensures that all stakeholders are aware and equipped to safeguard critical company resources.

The security model should be designed to meet your company's specific needs. This means you need different components and configurations than another business in a similar industry. For example, if your company handles sensitive personal information like credit card numbers, data encryption is essential when transmitting unencrypted content across the web.

5 Be Agile

Data architectures should provide rapid access to information with minimal effort. Fast access to information is critical to optimize resources. In addition, designing a scalable system from the start ensures you are okay when working at scale by maximizing performance while minimizing costs through load-balancing servers based on workloads. However, if your company has already invested heavily in legacy systems that are not equipped to handle cloud computing, it's essential to wait to abandon them entirely. Instead, look for ways for these and new systems to work better together by leveraging APIs or other integration methods.

Conclusion

The cloud is an effective way to store large data sets. Knowing how your business will grow and how much data you will need to keep to stay competitive is essential. Since the Cloud can be scaled on demand, it's critical that you design your architecture accordingly to accommodate future needs without issue.

Are you looking for a specialist who can help you migrate your data to the Cloud? Reach out to us today at smartncode.com. For a no-obligation quote, visit us at smartncode.com today.