Now is the do or die moment for organizations across enterprises to move to the cloud and begin proactively using data on an even greater scale than ever before.

This is one of the themes that will be heavily emphasized during the upcoming ThoughtSpot Beyond.2020 Digital Data Analytics Conference, which will begin Dec. 9 and is hosted by ThoughtSpot Inc., a technology company that produces business-intelligence analytics search software.

“Even pre-pandemic, many organizations were in the process of modernizing their cloud data and analytics moving to the cloud, but COVID is really just accelerated that the ones that innovated sooner here are performing better,” said Cindi Howson (pictured, left), chief data strategy officer at ThoughtSpot. “The ones that are still dragging their heels, the laggards, I am not convinced they will survive.”

Howson and Kent Graziano (pictured, right), chief technical evangelist at Snowflake, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the importance of cloud-based data solutions, as well as the Dec. 9 ThoughtSpot Beyond.2020 Digital Data Analytics Conference. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud-based data management is the future of a changing world

Graziano’s career began in the on-prem data warehouse world, and he’s been with been Snowflake, a cloud-based data-warehousing company, for five years now. He agrees with Howson’s assessment that moving to the cloud is crucial for helping to manage and truly empower data.

“Things were changing faster than anyone could have imagined,” Graziano said. “And the only way to really keep pace with the growth of data and the diversity of data, in my mind, was to go to the cloud. And this concept of having a data cloud where we can easily share and govern data is … the game changer … making customers and organizations so much more successful by being able to do things with data that they just couldn’t do in the on-prem world.”

The ah-ha moment came for Howson and Graziano when they saw the lines being blurred between traditional silos of data in the on-prem world and cloud solutions, including scaling data and creating unity for varying data in ways that have never been done before. The cloud truly empowers greater organizational efficiency and effectiveness, as well as agility of data. 

“It’s now [more] about the workload and the use case than it is about … the structure of the data or the location of the data,” Graziano said. “The form of the data is less important than it was. We can start with a very raw form and be doing data profiling and having data scientists look at it and maybe even feeding a machine learning engine in the process.”

The willingness to adapt quickly is the most important thing for enterprises, as well as building data fluency throughout organizations, according to Howson. And it’s about creating a company culture around data that helps move things forward.

“Start small with the business outcome — with your biggest pain or your biggest opportunity,” Howson stated. “Learn, figure out how you’re going to change the people, and then run fast — run faster than you ever have before. The rate of creative destruction has never been faster.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ThoughtSpot Beyond.2020 Digital Data Analytics Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Beyond.2020 Digital Data Analytics Conference. Neither ThoughtSpot Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE