Your Engine for Innovation: Designing a Cloud Data Warehouse

Managing the vast and expanding quantities of data your company now collects is critical. A recent survey from The Data Warehousing Institute found that 80% of respondents place business intelligence and data analytics as an essential component of their continued digital transformation and to enable them to reach their strategic goals.

There are several steps your business must take to ensure the data warehouse your company builds can meet all your strategic requirements today and can grow when your business needs to expand these services. The core steps to take include:

1. Understanding your strategic goals

   Data warehouses that work efficiently for the businesses that build them have one thing in common: They have been constructed by enterprises that have understood what a data warehouse should bring to their companies. Data warehouses do not exist in isolation. Data warehouse design must be part of your business’s broader strategy roadmap. Ask yourself what benefits you want your company to gain from the data warehouse you build.

2. Assessing your current data profile

   Before even considering the architecture of your data warehouse, a thorough audit of the data your company holds is vital to carry out to identify the datasets and siloes of data that will be integrated into your data lake and then the data warehouse you are designing.

3. The architecture of your data warehouse

   The strategic goals you have set for your data warehouse will inform this process step. Whether your business needs a one, two or three-tier, or a completely virtual data warehouse will be governed by the volumes of data your company has and how your data warehouse will be used as a strategic asset.

4. Creating your data lake

   Your business must create a data lake before building your data warehouse. A data lake amalgamates all the data you want to place in your data warehouse—for example, datasets from your accounting applications. Customer service records, or sales data, should all be moved to your data lake.

   It’s here where you can assess the quality of the data and its accuracy. The data lake step is essential to ensure the information in your data warehouse is a single source of truth that is accurate and trusted. Think about how metadata will be used with each data source and the lineage of each piece of information. This is the point at which data integration and ELT (Extract, Transform, Load) processes come into play.

5. Create and deploy your data warehouse.

   With an accurate dataset in your data lake, your business can move forward and architect your data warehouse. The data specialists can help you identify what kind of data warehouse is best for your business’s particular applications.

Ultimately, taking the time to understand your business’s data and how this information impacts your company’s strategic planning will ensure your data warehouse project delivers an asset that every part of your business can benefit from.

Building infrastructure

Building a data warehouse that delivers tangible value to your business needs expert partners with massive experience in data management and deep insights into how companies like yours use data.

The close connection that IONOS and Lumilinks have developed allows your business to partner with data experts. The journey your business takes to place data analysis at the core of all business processes begins with understanding how that data journey is structured. Lumilinks are data experts helping companies to ensure the information they place in a data warehouse is high quality, trusted and able to deliver the real-world insights your business needs to be agile and innovate at speed.

Connecting the services that Lumilinks has with the world-class infrastructure IONOS has created offers your business the opportunity to remove complexity from the construction of your data lake and data warehouse. IONOS and Lumilinks understand the core pressures your business is under. Partnering with IONOS reduces that complexity and delivers a new window onto your business’s data landscape. Creating a comprehensive, robust, secure, and flexible data warehouse has many moving parts that must be managed in unison. IONOS have the skills and the insights into how your business can place these services at the heart of your enterprise. Data warehouses are not just an IT exercise. They can positively impact your business’s operations, from finance to logistics.

Future Proofing

Assessing the quality of the data your business has and then transforming this into an asset needs experts who understand not only how raw data can become an essential asset but also have the skills and tools to allow your business to step into the age of data. A data warehouse can become the hub around which every aspect of your business orbits.

Your business needs to be dynamic and innovative. Data warehouses are not build-and-forget exercises but services that can grow and change as your business does. IONOS has long experience as a partner that can help your company drive its general plans for digital transformation and more specific goals, such as becoming a more sustainable company.

Constructing a data warehouse that delivers the data tools strategic insights and becomes an asset everyone in your business can benefit from needs expert partners with the skills and understanding of how data is now at the centre of your company’s success.

As the data space expands and changes, your business will be in a pivotal position to take advantage of these trends, as your data warehouse is ready and waiting to support every future initiative.

IONOS is a hosting and cloud partner for small and medium-sized businesses. We are experts in IaaS and have a portfolio of solutions to enhance your company’s digital profile.

Start your business’s journey to becoming a data-driven enterprise.