A while back I suggested that datacenter infrastructure would move from an on-premise operation to the cloud. It may have seemed counter-intuitive that the infrastructure itself would become available from the cloud, but that’s exactly what’s happening. We’ve now seen everything from security to system management to storage evolve into as-a-service datacenter offerings, yielding all the benefits of SaaS — rapid innovation, pay-as-you-go, no hardware installation — while at the same time providing rich enterprise functionality.
While big data is one of the newer parts of the infrastructure stack — and should have been architected and delivered as a service from the start — an estimated 90+% of Fortune 2000 companies carry out their big data analytics on-premise. These on-premise deployments are complex, hard to implement, and have already become something of a boat anchor when it comes to attempts to speed up big data analytics. Without question the time has come to move big data to the cloud and deliver this part of the infrastructure stack as a service. Enter Cazena — our latest investment in the big data sector. MORE