Submitted by MSPAlliance Member Kat McClure, Global Marketing Director, StratoGen Hosting–
In a big-picture sense, the story of this decade’s tech is the story of decentralized computing: the vanishing of locational and structural constraints on the backbone of business infrastructure. The business world’s introduction to this concept came with the cloud, still a carefully delineated place away from the fabric of the business itself- the cloud for storage, the cloud for hosting. But what’s really changing the way we work these days is the integration of these technologies directly into the workflow, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the explosion of Hadoop.
Hadoop, if you’re unfamiliar, is the driver of big data- the inevitable consequence of our business, marketing and technological needs outpacing our ability to store and process massive chunks of data. Hadoop does this by decentralizing the data, creating a distributable, atomized method of storage and processing. Where traditional avenues of managing this data break down, from Excel to NumPy, there’s Hadoop.
It’s taken some time for the potential opportunities of this technology to even be mapped out, much less exploited. Marketing, research, finance, retail- every industry, every point on the business lifecycle can benefit a strong hand on its big data needs. But there’s a catch: Hadoop can be big and expensive, and to work flawlessly it needs a highly flexible, highly sophisticated environment- and provisioning for this can be just as costly.
But there’s an elegant solution to this challenge that comes out of the same legacy of decentralization as Hadoop itself: Your business, your big data, your Hadoop- deployed to the cloud. All of the same benefits that the cloud has provided businesses when it comes to hosting and storage apply to the vastly more variable requirements of Hadoop. Your clusters need to be as flexible as your data is variable, and only a dedicated Hadoop-as-a-service (HaaS) provider like StratoGen will be able to offer you portioned access to runway that can serve your needs, whatever they may be, without waste or fear of sudden growth.
There’s also the consideration that Hadoop is a fairly new technology, and that means there’s no easy, out-of-the-box solutions for managing Hadoop clusters. Applications like Hive and Pig are bridging the gap between developer and end-user, but even these require a familiarity and a proficiency that your IT department might need to compensate for. Choosing a HaaS provider means access to their efficient, refined Hadoop APIs, so that you can spend less time transitioning and more time doing.
HaaS is uniquely positioned to negate all of the major shortcomings of Hadoop in the workplace- shrinking the initial capital outlay on infrastructure and expertise, paving the road to secure growth through dedicated scalability, and allowing your business to test the waters of big data processing with instantly available, low-cost trials. Together, Hadoop and the cloud perfectly fit the needs of any company that values fluidity and flexibility- all while leaving the end user firmly in control of data limits, costs, speed and uptime. Your infrastructure is your concern until its liquidation- Hadoop in the cloud’s costs are fundamentally tied up in your big data needs and nothing more.
In the end, the same features that make Hadoop endlessly appealing to the business world are making Hadoop as a service the favored way to manage big data, just as the features of the cloud itself enticed so many users from the tradition of centralized storage. A lightweight enterprise is a resilient enterprise, and HaaS is opening the door for firms of all sizes to handle more and more ambitious realms of data analysis, all while remaining flexible, scalable and free of bloat. If your business is ready to dive into big data- or just to dip its toes in the surface, getting started has never been easier.