Cloud Computing For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Managing Data

In This Chapter

• Ensuring security and privacy

• Recognizing management resources

• Discussing questions with your cloud vendor

There is no way around it: The issues surrounding data in a cloud environment is a big and complicated topic. The reality is that data is the lifeblood of organizations. Therefore, how you manage data, regardless of where it lives, is critical to the health of your business. Data has an entire lifecycle: It's created, changed, secured, stored (or destroyed), and governed. Although this is the normal process within the data center, forgetting management elements is easy when an outside service manages that data.

In this chapter, we discuss the key aspects of managing data in the cloud, including

• Data security and privacy (including data controls and managing the movement of data from point A to point B)

• Managing the resources for large-scale data processing

• Data storage

Declaring Data Types

The amount of data available for company use is exploding. In fact, the very nature of data is changing:

• Data diversity is increasing. Data in the cloud is becoming more diverse. In addition to traditional structured data (revenue, name, and so on), it includes emails, contracts, images, blogs, and more.

• The amount of data is increasing. Just think of how many videos YouTube manages or all the images Facebook handles. Even in the traditional data realm, organizations are starting to aggregate huge amounts of data (to solve problems that they could never have imagined ...