What Is a Cloud Data Warehouse and How Does It Work?
But what is a cloud data warehouse, exactly, and how can it benefit your business? If you’re asking these questions, you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ll go over the ins and outs of cloud-based data warehouses and how they work. Get a quick overview of the topics we’ll cover below:
- What is a cloud data warehouse?
- How does a cloud data warehouse work?
- How can a cloud-based data warehouse help your business?
- Does your business need a cloud data warehouse?
- 4 best cloud data warehouse providers
So, keep reading to learn more!
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What is a cloud data warehouse?
A cloud data warehouse is used to store, manage, and analyze big data from multiple sources. Cloud-based data warehouses enable you to collect data from your customer data platform (CDP), customer relationship management (CRM) software, marketing automation tools, and much more all in one place.
How does a cloud data warehouse work?
Now that you know the answer to the question, “what is a cloud data warehouse,” you might be wondering how they work.
A cloud-based data warehouse is managed and hosted online by a cloud services provider. It creates a virtual environment to store all of your data for your team to access and analyze.
When you use a cloud-based data warehouse, you’ll integrate your data from other systems, like your CRM software, email lists, website, and more, so you and your team can view your data and insights all in one place.
How can a cloud-based data warehouse help your business?
So, how can a cloud data warehouse help your business drive more sales and revenue? Check out a few noteworthy benefits of using a data warehouse below:
1. Streamline your processes
Cloud data warehouse solutions help keep your data and metrics organized and in one place for easy access. That means you won’t have to juggle multiple tools and platforms when you want to analyze your customer and campaign data.
As a result, you can streamline your marketing and sales processes to make them more efficient and save your company valuable time and resources.
2. Manage data on a large scale
Data has become critical to implementing effective marketing strategies that reach your ideal customers and increase revenue. As a result, it’s essential to have a system that enables you to manage and analyze large quantities and various data types.
Cloud-based data warehouses are scalable, which means whether you’re a small to medium-sized business (SMB) or an enterprise, it can be flexible to provide the data solutions that suit your company’s needs.
3. Gain real-time insights
With cloud data warehouse solutions, you can analyze your customer and campaign data in real-time to drive fast and informed marketing decisions.
By gaining real-time insights into the success of your marketing campaigns and sales processes, you can quickly identify areas for improvement and potential optimizations. As a result, you can improve your strategies to drive even better results for your business.
4. Power your campaigns with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)
Many data warehouses allow you to use machine learning and AI to power your marketing campaigns and maximize your results. When you collect data in your cloud-based warehouse, AI and machine learning can develop algorithms to provide you with predictive insights.
For example, it can help you anticipate web traffic spikes, audience behavior on your website, and much more. You can then use these insights to inform your marketing strategies to drive more revenue for your company.
Does your business need a cloud data warehouse?
Now that you know a little more about cloud data warehouses and how they work, you might consider whether you need to invest in one for your business.
Investing in a cloud-based data warehouse could be the perfect option for you if you need or want any of the following solutions:
- Large-scale data collection and management
- Data collection and management from multiple sources
- Machine learning and AI initiatives
- Custom report generation
- Real-time data analysis
If you want to streamline your marketing processes to become more efficient and make smarter, more informed marketing decisions, investing in cloud data warehouse solutions is a must.
4 best cloud data warehouse providers
Are you looking for the best cloud data warehouse providers to start powering your marketing campaigns with data-driven insights? Then we’ve got you covered.
Check out 4 of the best cloud data warehouse providers below:
1. Google BigQuery
Pricing: $0.02 per GB of data processed
BigQuery is Google’s cloud data warehouse that enables companies to store and query their data. With BigQuery, you can upload large data sets and let the platform’s machine learning capabilities help you better understand your data.
Here are some of the main features of Google BigQuery:
- Real-time analytics
- Logical data warehouses to process external data sources
- Automatic data transfer services from multiple platforms, such as YouTube or Google Ads
- Geoexpansion to control your geographic data
- Automatic backup and easy restore
- Interactive data queries
- And more
BigQuery makes it easy for you to understand your data and make smarter, data-driven marketing decisions that boost revenue for your business.
2. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Pricing: $5 per TB of data processed
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that combines data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics.
With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can query data on a large scale and use machine learning solutions to help you implement effective marketing strategies.
Check out the main features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics below:
- Unified analytics platform
- Enterprise data warehousing solutions
- Code-free hybrid data integration
- Log and telemetry analytics
- Integrated AI and business intelligence (BI)
- Serverless and dedicated hosting options
- Data lake exploration
- Integrated Apache Spark and SQL engines
- And more
If you’re searching for a cloud data warehouse that provides you with a seamless, unified data integration system, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could be the perfect fit for your company.
3. Snowflake
Pricing: Custom
Next on our list of the best cloud data warehouse providers is Snowflake. Snowflake is a fully-managed data warehouse that provides serverless data storage solutions.
With Snowflake, you can take advantage of its global data replication feature, enabling you to move your data to any cloud in any region. That means you won’t have to spend large amounts of time re-coding your applications or manually updating your date.
Here are more key features of Snowflake:
- Automated data management
- Secure global collaboration and data collection
- Single elastic performance engine
- SQL support
- Machine learning infrastructure
- Data sharing
- Cross-cloud and cross-region connectivity
- Third-party data marketplace
- And much more
Snowflake helps you collect and manage data across multiple regions and share that data with your team throughout your organization. So, if you’re looking for a large-scale data warehouse for your business, Snowflake could be an excellent option.
4. Amazon Redshift
Pricing: $0.25 per hour
Amazon Redshift is one of the most widely used cloud-based data warehouses. Amazon Redshift enables you to analyze exabytes of data and run complex analytical queries. In addition, you can run and scale analytics on all of your data within seconds.
Check out some of the main features of Amazon Redshift below:
- Machine learning models for predictive insights
- Data sharing and collaboration
- Insight-driven reports and dashboards
- Automated table design
- Data export and query options
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration
- End-to-end encryption
- And much more
Amazon Redshift makes it simple to manage your data with customizable options to visualize essential information and insights to inform your marketing strategies.
Measuring the metrics that affect your bottom line.
Are you interested in custom reporting that is specific to your unique business needs? Powered by MarketingCloudFX, WebFX creates custom reports based on the metrics that matter most to your company.
- Leads
- Transactions
- Calls
- Revenue
Drive more revenue with an industry-leading cloud data warehouse from WebFX
Are you ready to seamlessly integrate your campaign and customer data into one platform? Data warehouse services from WebFX can help!
Our in-house marketing proprietary software, MarketingCloudFX, comes with various built-in integrations to enable your systems and platforms to automatically share and update data.
Start making smarter, data-driven marketing decisions to maximize your results today. Learn more about our data warehouse services by chatting with one of our strategists at 888-601-5359 or by contacting us online. We can’t wait to help your business grow!