The amalgamation of cloud and big data can be attributed to fresh IT wave that is causing ripples across IT departments of different industry verticals. Challenges associated with data storage in the new environment of big data and cloud, are influenced mainly by rapidly accumulating data. 

It is becoming increasingly overwhelming to separate and discard irrelevant data due to huge volume and rapid generation of big data. This is also causing difficulties in development of cost efficient storage tiers. 

Thankfully, cloud computing technology and related storage solutions can effectively deal with these daunting issues. This has lead to recent efforts by cloud providers and enterprises that are focused at harnessing big data and cloud for to derive more and more benefits. 

In order to build the next generation service offering that combines big data and cloud, cloud planners need to devise the most optimum platform for cloud database. In order to achieve this, we need to critically assess the advantages that would be available by implementation of cloud and big data in organizations with diverse requirements. 

Fathoming the potential of big data on cloud

By blending cloud and big data, organizations can hope to reduce operating costs to a considerable extent and boost financial management in terms of storage. There will be a significant growth in revenues backed by creation of new revenue sources. 

Organizations can harness these technologies for reorganizing customers by leveraging securely stored data in cloud to improve customer service, find new opportunities, or determine new resources. 

Advantage SMEs

Cloud and big data can together provide amazing benefits to smaller enterprises by enabling them to instantly upgrade life cycles of their product development. No wonder, as many as 57 percent medium enterprises and 18 percent smaller ones are relying on solutions that are supported by data analytics. The extent of data analytics applications in SMBs is certainly going to expand due to proliferation of cloud computing

Dealing with challenges of putting big data in cloud

Skepticism about security and privacy concerns associated with cloud are arresting movement of big data in distributed storage systems by a large number of organizations. In addition to these security related issues, data governance is responsible for hampering amalgamation of cloud and big data. 

It should be understood that data governance relates to the establishment of data frameworks and responsibilities of individuals in order to achieve business objectives. One of the vital aspects of big data in cloud governance is concerned with solutions that guzzle the data from outer sources in massive proportions. 

This underlines significance of chalking out an optimally essential as well as justifiable data policy that defines data type that is required to be stored. It is necessary to specify availability period and ways of data retrieval as well. Contemporary cloud hosting services are expected to satisfy requirements of mobile users who demand single or multiple types of information instantly.

It means that even if there is a security breach, overall data availability should not be impacted. There is a vital issue of inability to acquire a complete view of customer purchase details due to utilization of cloud apps coupled with reliance on big data. 

Significant advantages of merging cloud and big data

Super-easy implementation- Cloud computing brings about considerable reduction in complexity while implementing a given big data application within the infrastructure of organization. It should be understood that implementation of any big data solution, one needs to incorporate number of components in unified manner. 

Lesser time to market- It is extremely easy to provision servers in a cloud environment. One can provision servers as fast and as easily as shopping for one’s favorite object online. Scaling of big data environments up or down can be effectively performed without any hassles in order to meet the requirements. As such, it is essential to achieve faster provisioning because significance of data shrinks rapidly as the time progresses.  

Assured scalability- Instant provisioning of servers is an important prerequisite for implementation of big data analytics especially in healthcare industry due to need of massive processing power for very short time. Cloud environment is ideal for this type of flexibility and adaptability.  Moreover utility based payment structure of cloud helps control expenditure and obviate investment in super computers. 

Combination of cloud and big data facilitates new product introduction or enablement of services without any delay. While the most lucrative benefit is that of cost saving due to the combination of big data, one can also achieve excellent scalability and flexibility as icing on the cake.
 
Future prospects of organizations adopting cloud and big data

Enterprises can explore new horizons of business opportunities by embracing big data and cloud. Thanks to big data on cloud, it is possible to get 360 degree view of customers for understanding behavior patterns. Thus big data and cloud will be major drivers of growth in terms of productivity while reducing time to market with excellent cost efficiency of utility billing.