Nowadays, you will surely find a wide variety of platforms, which can offer you a range of prices, functionality, integrations, or other variables that are important when selecting a cloud data platform.
But, how do you start to select the right tool for your organization?
To do this, you must follow some steps that will facilitate this task:
- Evaluate your need
- Consider your corporate strategy
- Make a checklist of what you need
- Evaluate market options
- Carry out a selection process
- If possible, perform service tests.
Before advancing to a more detailed description of this process, let’s start by talking about cloud data platforms.
These are tools in which you can store large volumes of data, which will serve you to perform data analysis tasks, which will be used for other technological developments for your company.
Some of the platforms you find in the market are Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Databricks, and Snowflake. All of them, according to their growth, offer these data storage and analysis services.
And although initially these only offered data loading, today they can be used to transfer data from one platform to another.
In the same way, create interactions that are very useful for the organization, in addition to adjusting to other solutions you may require, including the simplification of repetitive tasks.
Even so, choosing the platform that suits your needs is not an easy task, since, in addition to choosing it, it must be clear what its intended use is, who will administer it, and whether all the potential it offers will be exploited.
Steps to select the cloud data tool
Here we summarize in four steps what you should consider for your selection:
Self-assessment: you must know what the value of your organization is and what its objectives are in order to define the need to be satisfied.
For this, you can review what the current budget is to adopt or build a cloud data platform and what the budget will be in the future.
Selection process: based on your strategies, capabilities, the reality of the collaborators, and the expected results, you must proceed to plan the use of the cloud and integrations.
Likewise, analyze the management and monitoring tools of the organization and if they meet current needs.
Analyze various attributes: here you must consider aspects such as features of monitoring and management tools, analysis/BI tools, and data science tools, attributes of management, administration, and maintenance of the implementation of the different platforms.
Product testing: and finally, if possible, try a demo of the product, collect recommendations, or validate the quality of the tool.
Implementation
Now, for the implementation and launch process of your cloud tool, it is important that you consider: who the provider is, how they will support you, what inputs you must deliver, what are the outstanding attributes that will add value to your process.
This will allow you to have a list of minimum qualities that bidders must meet, which you can then rate, and thus select the one that best suits you.
Our advice, even before closing the deal, is to request a roadmap of the tool’s implementation, its use, task execution, and other information that you deem important.
This works for us with our clients, whom we accompany from the evaluation of their strategy, project definition, roadmap, implementation, and project delivery.
Do you want to know how we do it? Write to us at comunicaciones@bpt.com.co