Cloud Computing for Digital Marketers

From sharing documents over Slack to smartphone data backups on iCloud, the cloud touches many of the technological aspects of our daily lives. When you take a picture on your smartphone, it is stored on your phone’s internal memory drive. However, when you upload the photos to Facebook or Instagram, you are uploading them to the cloud.

Cloud is a network of servers, each with a different function. Realising the importance of harnessing the power of big data, corporations from Airbnb to American Airlines are increasingly engaging the services of cloud service providers, who are swiftly taking over the enterprise computing market. Cloud has become a favourite because it allows organisations to store huge volume of structured (i.e. CRM) and unstructured data (i.e. web analytics, social media feeds) at a fraction of the cost of owning a traditional data warehouse. Unlike traditional data warehouses, which can be challenging to scale economically, cloud allows organisations to store data from many different sources in a much more nimble and efficient manner.

Being a marketer and end user of big data platforms, I realised that it is important to have a basic understanding on the technology and the key implications of implementing it within organisations (be it hybrid or full cloud-based model). As such, I started reading tech blogs and spoke to cloud computing subject matter experts to find out more about it in relation to my digital marketing role.

So “What does Cloud really mean and how does it affects me?”

Source: Alex Hallatt

For marketers, here are 4 key points you should know about cloud computing:

2. Cloud computing allows organisations to be nimble, efficient and cost-effective

Today, organisations gather massive amount of data and cloud providers supply the hardware and algorithms to help businesses harness the advantages of big data. Instead of paying a fortune to build new or expand existing data centers, organisations can now leverage on the economies of scale of these cloud providers to store data more efficiently and economically. For marketers, it also means that now you can have access to more data in real-time seamlessly.

Also, cloud computing providers often offer infrastructures along with management services, which allow organisations to offload supporting tasks like sending batch CRM files daily into Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)and troubleshooting. This would free up IT workforce to work on other projects that are more critical to the success of a business.

3. The “BIG Three” — Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure

The diagram below illustrates the respective clients of the “BIG Three”.

4. Resources and trainings available on cloud computing

While organisations are eager to move into the cloud, it is undeniable that there is a significant skills/knowledge gap within most organisations, especially between the Marketing and IT departments. Here are some FREE useful tutorials/online courses that you can explore:

In gist, I have explained what is cloud computing, why do organisations adopt it and who are the leaders in the space. I will be sharing in a subsequent article on how cloud computing is changing the design of data architecture and how this will benefit marketers in terms of extracting actionable insights from big data in real-time.

I hope that my article has sparked your interest to learn more about cloud computing. For cloud experts out there, greatly appreciate if you can drop me a note to share your thoughts on my piece, and I would very much appreciate if you can share your experience/expertise to help me on this journey.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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