Implications of Storing Data on the Cloud

In this podcast Rob Steward explains how clouds are currently used for storing data and how this is going to impact the IT landscape. This podcast lasts for 3:44 and can be listened to here: http://blogs.datadirect.com/media/ImplicationsOfStoringDataOnCloud.mp3

Rob Steward:

There's a lot of data being moved out into the cloud, and there's a lot of different paradigms that are coming up in order to access that data, so let me give you an example. Microsoft has recently moved SQL Server in the Cloud, Amazon's got SimpleDB, there are a lot of other ones out there that I could talk about. And those are really databases within the clouds. If you think about it, SAS applications -- so something like a NetSuite or a Salesforce CRM or an application that you've written in Force.com for that platform of Salesforce's are cloud-based apps. The data that lives within Salesforce.com, it's really your corporate data. It's how do you access that data? How do you get to the data within Simple DB or within Salesforce.com or with any of the platforms or any of the SAS vendors out there? You know, you may use Workday or you may use any of the popular -- NetSuite or any of the more popular SaaS applications out there.

It creates an interesting data integration problem, and the reason that I say this is if all of your customer data sits within Salesforce but all of your ERP data sits within SAP inside your enterprise, how do you combine that data? How do you integrate that data? And so there are very interesting things happening in the cloud to allow you to do integration. There's companies like Pervasive and Cast Iron that are all producing solutions that can do integrations point-to-point within the clouds.

(Image credit: Cloud Computing by Kevin Krejci)

Well, one of the things that we're looking at, at Progress DataDirect, is how do we integrate that data that's out there in your Salesforce app or any of those SAS applications, or within those databases in the cloud. How do you integrate them with your data that's inside your firewall? And how do you integrate them into the apps that you're familiar with that run on your desktop? So if you like Crystal Reports to do reporting, how do you hook that up and get your data out of NetSuite and be reporting using Crystal Reports on that? So I think that there are a lot of interesting questions, and I'll just say that we at Progress DataDirect are going to solve some of these problems of how you integrate through standards based APIs, but also the more general question about data in the cloud -- I don't see a big movement yet outside of SAS applications. A lot of people use a Salesforce or NetSuite. What I don't see yet is, Amazon SimpleDB or SQL Server in the Cloud or any of those databases that just live in the cloud -- I don't see yet real business applications running on them. I see people playing with them. So I'm inclined to say the jury's still out on whether those are viable as just back-end data stores. We’ll see as we move forward.