How to get more value from your cloud data warehouse

When it comes to your data storage and management, the cloud is the future. That’s not opinion — it’s inevitable. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2023, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform. The shift comes as businesses everywhere look to modernize their data management practices, moving from physical data centers to more easily accessible, cloud-based data warehouses.

But as with any emerging technological innovation, there’s a natural period of adjustment to the solution, and a need for deeper clarification and understanding. That’s why we put together this quick writeup to break down the basics of a cloud data warehouse (what it is, why you need it, how it plays with the rest of your tech stack), to highlight the latest trends in the industry, and help you start to derive more value from your existing data warehouse.

What is a cloud data warehouse?

A cloud-based data warehouse is the ultimate source of truth for the data that drives your business. It allows you to consolidate all of your disparate data sources into one secure, centralized location for better organization and easier access. With businesses choosing this more convenient solution, the industry has grown dramatically, and a few major players have emerged, namely: Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and Microsoft Azure.

Benefits of a cloud data warehouse

There are seemingly limitless benefits of adopting a cloud data warehouse for your business. Aside from the obvious efficiency of moving all your data under the same virtual roof, the cloud offers a level of flexibility that on-premises data storage simply cannot.

Perhaps the most important benefit of a cloud-based system is that it allows you to easily access and derive insights from your most important customer data. Traditional data storage systems keep your data secure, but don’t allow you to do anything with it. It just sits there, inactionable, gathering metaphorical dust. With a cloud-based system, you can access any and all customer data you need, analyze the data, and use those insights to inform future strategy. Cloud-based data warehouses facilitate analytics and learnings in a way that on-premises storage never could. Other key benefits of a cloud data warehouse include:

1. Security/compliance:

You can be assured that your most sensitive customer data and your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) is safe in a secure data warehouse. This keeps things organized and reduces the risk of data compromise or a breach. It also helps keep you GDPR compliant by giving you a single source of truth on your customers, so you know who you can engage with, and who has opted out of communications.

2. Storage capacity and cost:

Cloud data warehouses offer virtually unlimited storage capacity and are much more cost effective than physical storage locations. No more purchasing expensive hardware and monitoring an extensive server room that’s straight out of a spy movie. Now all your data can be stored in the cloud at a fraction of the cost.

3. Decisioning dashboards:

Because of the easy accessibility and efficiency of a cloud data warehouse, you can quickly run highly specific queries to pull out relevant information from your data library. This data can then be transformed into data dashboards, complete with analytics trends and graphics that help to inform your decision-making process.

The big trend: Reverse ETL

First, for clarification and because there are far too many acronyms in the data world to keep track of them all, a quick definition. ETL is essentially the process of moving data from all your disparate sources into your cloud-based data warehouse. It stands for:

Extract: Grabbing the data from its various sources
Transform: Cleaning the data and changing it into the appropriate storage format and structure
Load: Inserting the data into the new database

Reverse ETL then is, you guessed it, the process of sending data out into your business intelligence and marketing tools where it is actionable. It’s one of the major trends emerging with cloud data warehouses because it allows you to take action on your centrally managed data. More on reverse ETL here.

Where Lytics comes in

One challenge that has cropped up since the rise of cloud data warehouses is with companies that are already using a customer data platform (CDP), like Lytics, as the single source of truth for their customer data. But where others see conflict, we see opportunity. We believe that your cloud data warehouse can (and should) complement your CDP strategy.

That’s why we created Cloud Connect.

With Lytics Cloud Connect, you can take customer data straight from your data warehouse and use it to create highly targeted audience segments directly in your ad networks – improving ad targeting in minutes. Here’s a quick video explaining how it works:

Using a reverse ETL approach, Cloud Connect allows you to query specific data segments from your data warehouse that you can then send directly into advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, TikTok and more. Cloud Connect is a game changer for your advertising & analytics teams alike.

Cloud data warehouses are the future of data storage and management. When combined with your Lytics Cloud Connect, you have an opportunity to create the most comprehensive data and analytics experience imaginable.

To read more about Cloud Connect, visit our introductory blog or get started for free and build your first target audience today using your own first-party data warehouse data.