3 Reasons to Move Your Geospatial Data to the Cloud
Does your organization keep its geospatial data completely on-premises? Maybe you keep data on a shared network drive; maybe you're already making use of database and application servers, but they are physical hardware taking up space and resources. In either case, you should consider the potential benefits of moving your geospatial data to the cloud.
What is Cloud Storage?
Today the term "cloud" is fairly commonplace, but what does it mean? Cloud computing simply means that computing resources and services like servers, databases, networking, and processing power are delivered over the Internet. That is, instead of using a physical hardware server to run your company's databases, you can provision virtual computing resources to take care of the same tasks. Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive are examples of consumer-facing cloud data services. In the business world, cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are often utilized to power data management operations and applications.
There's no magic - somewhere out there, there are large data centers with arrays of physical server machines powering what we call the cloud. Providing those services over the Internet, however, comes with a number of potential advantages over on-premises servers and storage.
Why Should You Move Your Geospatial Data to the Cloud?
There are numerous advantages of cloud data storage, and many apply to very well to location data. Geospatial cloud computing comes in many forms. It may mean deploying database applications like PostGIS to a virtual server, or it may mean using one of several commercial cloud platforms like Mapbox or ArcGIS Online.
Let's look at three key reasons why cloud storage for your location data may be a good idea:
1. Accessibility and Collaboration
Improved accessibility and collaboration are possibly the greatest benefit of geospatial cloud storage over on-premises options. If your team is spread across multiple locations or works in the field on a regular basis, cloud services can ensure that your team has access to your data no matter where they are. Cloud platforms make it simple to set up secure data access regardless of location - something that can be difficult to manage securely from a self-managed network.
High accessibility also leads to improved collaboration options. With on-premises data storage, you're generally limited to collaboration with other people on-premises. Cloud storage enables distributed teams to work on the same data. It also improves sharing options outside of your organization. For example, if you need to share data and other content with your customers, on-premises data storage can present some frustrating challenges. Alternatively, if your content is in the cloud you can easily share it via web applications and services.
2. Scalability
If you're running on-premises servers, and your usage needs start to outpace your hardware capabilities, you're left with few options but to add or upgrade your hardware. This is an expensive and time-consuming proposition. However, with cloud platforms, both horizontal and vertical scaling can be extremely simple.
Horizontal scaling means adding server machines. Cloud services like AWS and Azure make it easy to deploy multiple instances of an application behind a load balancer so that you can scale your applications as your user base grows.
Vertical scaling means increasing the resources (i.e. CPU and RAM) available to a single instance. Again, with physical hardware, this means purchasing and installing new components into your machine. Alternatively, cloud services let you add CPU and RAM to your server and database instances in-place, with the click of a button.
In both cases, cloud platforms make scaling your data management and applications very easy.
3. Reliability and Security
Cloud data storage can provide the redundancy and reliability needed to make sure you can access your data when you need it most. Keeping mission-critical data completely on-premises is a potential vulnerability - disasters, power outages, or even theft can potentially interrupt your operations.
Moving your geospatial data to the cloud means that you can leverage tools like content delivery networks (CDNs) to make sure that your data is available to your team wherever and whenever they need it. Cloud platforms make it easy to create redundant copies of your data, adding a level of security should you ever need to recover something.
Moving Geospatial to the Cloud
Is it possible to set up premises data servers in a way that addresses most of these shortcomings?
Of course.
However, the time and people needed in order to do so can quickly overshadow the fees associated with cloud services. By outsourcing some of the infrastructure and IT services to cloud platforms, your team gains more time to work on the meat of your business.
There are numerous cloud-based tools out there that can help you manage, analyze, and visualize your location data, and in the coming months, we will dive deeper into some of these tools and methods. Cloud computing offers many benefits for all types of data management, including geospatial data. No matter the size of your organization, there is likely an opportunity to take advantage of the many benefits cloud data management can offer.
Learn more about moving your geospatial data to the cloud and how it can improve your operations.
