What is the relationship between cloud computing and big data?

Amit Agrawal
4 min readMar 2, 2020

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At present, we are witnessing the rise of technologies that are rapidly shaping our present and will certainly impact our immediate future. Among these technologies, big data and cloud computing have emerged as a key player in the technological domain.

However, both of them are marred with poor scalability, difficulties in installation, security issues, fault tolerance, lower performance as well as maintenance issues in the framework of conventional information technology. So, we have to leverage each of these innovative technologies to find solutions to different other problems. Hence, big data and cloud computing deal with each other, for instance google big data services. Both of them have an inherent connection existing between them. Also, the latest breakthrough of big data, as well as cloud computing, will not just simply resolve problems but even promote the wider application of technologies such as IoT.

Before we understand the relationship between cloud computing and big data, let’s have an overview of both of them.

Big Data

It essentially means a large set of unstructured, structured, or even semi-structured data, in range of gigabytes or petabytes, and analyzing those data in order to obtain insights into the existing business trend.

Cloud Computing

It provides services to users as per the pay-as-you-go model. Providers of cloud computing services offer three distinct and primary services.

IAAS or Infrastructure as a Service- The provider offers complete infrastructure coupled with maintenance related tasks.

PAAS or Platform as a Service- The provider offers various resources like runtime, object storage, queuing, along with databases, and much more. However, the entire responsibility of the configuration, as well as implementation related tasks, actually depend on the customers.

SAAS or Software as a Service- It is the most facilitated one that provides all the required settings as well as infrastructure offered by the IaaS for the platform.

Cloud Computing and Big Data- A Vital Relationship

Owing to the generation of the huge volume of data, cloud computing is playing quite a major and significant role in the actual storage as well as management of the data. Also, it isn’t just the growth of big data that we have witnessed but also the expansion of various data analytics platforms such as Hadoop. Due to this, it is generating new opportunities in the entire cloud computing.

So, the cloud software solutions provided by companies such as Google, Microsoft, and AWS, are essentially offering their own data systems in quite an efficient manner, which is quite scalable for businesses of different sizes.

It has led to a new service model popularly known as AaaS or Analytics as a Service. It will offer a scalable and faster way to easily integrate various kinds of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data along with analyzing them as well as transform and even visualize them actually in real-time.

Along with this, cloud computing- big data relationships can easily be assessed from the below-mentioned benefits as well as perspectives.

1. Essentially, a cloud computing environment has different user terminals as well as service providers. Hence, from the collection terminals, the users can easily collect the data utilizing the big data tools. Also, from the end of the service provider, it saves and even stores along with process the big data. So, cloud computing offers a big data infrastructure. Also, the infrastructure needs to provide various on-demand resources as well as services to make sure the uninterrupted service is provided.

2. As the cloud environment is completely scalable, so it can easily offer adequate and necessary data management solution without any restriction of the volume of data. In case it is necessary, the providers of cloud computing services can even offer security policies according to user demands.

3. When it comes to dealing with confidential company data, identity management, as well as access control, are two vital concerns. Cloud computing can easily meet this particular requirement utilizing a basic software interface by easily abstracting internal details of the required information. Also, it guarantees the necessary confidentiality of the entire user data and only offers access to the particular authorized users.

4. In the case of big data for data processing, which can be located across different locations and maintaining such large servers in various locations, it is a costly measure for any organization. Since cloud computing can easily store as well as process data through various locations along with virtual servers, basically it reduces the overall cost of big data processing by a significant margin.

5. Essentially cloud computing utilizes high-level software as well as applications that don’t even depend on the efficiency of the actual user devices. Also, it depends on the actual network servers and their own strength. However, if we utilize personal resources for the purpose of big data, then it will be dependent on the actual user device. So, big data cloud solutions are beneficial.

Conclusion

This explains the existing and beneficial relationship between cloud computing and big data.

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Amit Agrawal

Amit Agrawal Founder and COO at Cyber Infrastructure Inc which is an custom software development company.