The cloud has quickly become one of the most important technologies in the modern world. After all, the benefits of the cloud speak for themselves — the many performance, cost, and other benefits that the cloud provides make it one of the most exciting new technologies of the past decade.

One of the big things that the cloud benefits is data management. However, there is a lot to consider regarding this. After all, as with anything, moving to a new system will have challenges and lots of considerations you need to make before fully implementing it into your own business.

In this article, we’re going to go over the key challenges that cloud data management can bring. We’ll also take a look at the best way to combat these challenges and ensure your organisation can prosper, and show you how you can get started today.

Key Challenges in Cloud Data Management for SMBs

Security Concerns

While the cloud is far more secure than an on-premise system, there are security concerns when it comes to the cloud. After all, a large part of the cloud is giving your data over to an external company to let them take care of it instead of being in control of it yourself.

On top of this, there are concerns when it comes to transporting data. After all, data is most vulnerable in transit, and failing to use methods such as encryption will mean that your data is essentially waiting to be intercepted. With this, it’s vital to ensure that encryption standards are high.

Ultimately, if you’re worried about your most sensitive data — and, especially for high data sensitivity institutions like hospitals or government organisations — the best cloud providers offer ways for you to be able to use a hybrid cloud and on-premise system.

But, as long as you’re using a system that is trusted and secure, such as Microsoft Azure, your data will be secure in the public cloud.

Compliance and Regulatory Hurdles

Data compliance and regulation is a vital discussion in the modern world. With so many guidelines, like GDPR, for example, that companies need to follow, compliance is becoming more and more complex every day.

It doesn’t help that companies are also under massive pressure to comply. After all, failing to follow regulatory requirements can lead to hefty fines, and possibly even litigation in some cases.

And, this isn’t just a threat, either. The ICO has a whole page dedicated to actions they’ve taken to punish organisations that fail to comply. This includes some of the biggest companies in the world, including Meta (formerly Facebook), who have been fined by the ICO multiple times.

Data Integration and Quality Issues

On top of all of these, data integration into a cloud infrastructure can be challenging. This is because different data has lots of different formats, structures, and definitions. It can be difficult to integrate it all, as well as keep all that data integrated in real-time.

On top of this, data quality issues such as duplicates, outdated data, and incorrect and inaccurate data can become an issue if data integration isn’t done correctly. This is why accurate data integration is vital.

Microsoft Azure: A Solution to Cloud Data Management Challenges

Enhancing Data Security with Azure

Microsoft Azure is the best solution for ensuring your cloud data is as secure as possible. It has a ton of tools that you can use to ensure that your data remains safe, including —

• Encryption: Encryption is one of the most important security tools as it protects your data all the time, and is the last shield for your data as a whole. Azure uses industry-standard data encryption (256-bit AES), safeguarding your information.

• Threat Protection: Tools such as Azure Security Centre and Azure Sentinel will keep your organisation safe from any threats.

• Identity and Access Management: Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) will ensure that you have a great access control tool, to ensure any bad faith actors don’t get into your company.

• Physical Security: Due to the nature of Microsoft as an organisation, their physical servers are highly secure, with round-the-clock surveillance and lots of security checks to ensure that nobody can even get close to your data.

Simplifying Compliance with Azure Tools

Compliance can be complex. Microsoft Azure simplifies the whole process, and has lots of features and resources to ensure you remain compliant —

• Azure Security: Tools like Azure Security Center mean that you can take care of the security side of compliance easily, without having to worry about whether your security solution is strong enough.

• Azure Compliance Manager: Azure Compliance Manager is a tool that guides you through the process of meeting compliance regulations, meaning that you are always aware of your progress towards full compliance.

• Azure Compliance Documentation: Microsoft Azure comes with extensive and comprehensive documentation regarding compliance, to help inform you.

Streamlining Data Integration and Analysis

Data integration is an issue, as ensuring that your information is not only correct but also works together is vital to ensuring cloud success. Azure has many tools and features that help with this —

• Azure Data Factory: Azure Data Factory lets you orchestrate data movement and transformation between diverse sources into a centralised data store for analysis.

• Azure Synapse Analytics: Azure Synapse Analytics is a unified analytics platform that integrates data warehousing and big data analytics, ingesting data from various sources and cleaning it, ultimately making it legible. This makes large-scale data exploration possible.

How to Get Started

Data is a vital part of your organisation, and the cloud is the future of business data. However, the cloud does come with its own set of considerations and challenges that you need to consider.

Microsoft Azure is the best platform for cloud computing and has lots of different tools to tackle these cloud computing challenges and help your organisation prosper.

If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft Azure and don’t know how, reach out to us today, and see how we can help.

‍