The democratization of compute and storage catalyzed by the rise of the public cloud is driving more and more organizations for whom large-scale analytics were previously cost-prohibitive to tap into their internal, fast-growing information troves. That increasing data use in turn is fueling the consumption of yet more external infrastructure resources, thereby creating a sort of feedback loop that Eric Valenzuela, a product manager at Full360, doesn’t expect to slow anytime soon.

“Now that there’s a place for tremendous amounts of data, people will continue growing their data requirements. As long as there are no restrictions, those datasets will continue to grow, and there will always be a reason to analyze those things,” he told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at the recently concluded HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston.

Paving a solid road

Full360 has followed that trend since its inception with the emergence of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the middle of the last decade. The New York-based consultancy has been leveraging the retail giant’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform to this very day, and the Vertica analytic database for about as long. Yet according to Venezuela, it wasn’t until fairly recently that customers first began to recognize just how powerful the combination of the two can be. Like with other vendors, it took a concentrated effort by the firm to hammer home the message, an initiative that is now paying major dividends.

“Even just a couple years ago, a lot of the work that we were doing was purely education, we were teaching people that building these platforms in the cloud and efficient,” he detailed. “Now with bigger adoption, we’re not having those conversations anymore, now it’s about how do we get to that point much quicker.”

Turning functionality into results

Decision makers are much more comfortable with the thought of storing company data in the cloud than they were in the past, but many organizations are still hesitant about moving information outside the safety of the corporate firewall. Venezuela doesn’t see why. He pointed out that platforms such as AWS offer economics of scale far greater than what most CIOs can hope to deliver internally, and added that the top providers have invested heavily in securing their environments over the years. That effort has not been in vain. Several of Full360’s customers – which include major airlines and a number of banks – are already storing customer data in the public cloud, he highlighted.

Another major advantage that infrastructure-as-a-service offers over on-premise environments is simplicity. Valenzuela said that the knowledge that every new instance spun up on AWS comes with a consistent set of specifications decoupled from the messy details of the underlying infrastructure allows the firm to focus on driving tangible value instead of worrying about the plumbing.

“We leverage DevOps and we only have to make changes and additions to our scripts once to provide that to all of our customers, so we’re not starting from scratch each time and building up from there,” he detailed. That not only eliminates a tremendous amount of repetitive manual work, freeing up developers to spend their time elsewhere, but also reduces the risk of human error in the process.

According to Valenzuela, achieving the same results in a traditional on-premise environment would require considerably more effort. “If we develop a script we know exactly how that’s gonna operate and behave inside the cloud. In order to take that and apply it on-premise, we would have to understand how that network works and modify it to make it work.”

The big picture

As important as it is, infrastructure-as-a-service is just one side of the cloud analytics equation. The data processing element just as inseparable, and Full360 is treating it accordingly. The firm provides a complete package that implements Vertica on AWS and rounds out the deployment with service-level guarantees and professional support. The offering has gone through “years of development in order to get a finally tuned deployment on AWS,” Valenzuela said.

The bundle is made to be as transparent as possible, he added. Customers pay Full360 for the management on a month-to-month basis and purchase the cloud resources they consume directly from AWS, an arrangement that leaves no room for trust issues.

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