What is an enterprise data warehouse (EDW)? Advantages & Types

The enterprise data warehouse (EDW) consolidates a business's information across multiple sources and applications and makes it available for analytics and use across the company. EDWs can be hosted on-premises or in the cloud.

A digital warehouse can be one of the most valuable assets for a business since the data it stores represents much of what is known about the business, its employees, and its customers.

There are several advantages to maintaining an enterprise data warehouse solution for an organization. In general, data collection and storage are viewed from a marketing or customer relations perspective, and that is certainly part of the picture.

However, a data warehouse offers more than just that. By automatically aggregating data from seemingly random sources, it can help to make sense of seemingly random information entering the organization. When organizations organize their data in a systematic, automated manner, they are likely to be better positioned for growth in the future.

Previously, EDWs were on-premises systems with a fixed processing and storage capacity. The company was unable to scale quickly or easily when there was a high demand. For organizations adopting new systems, cloud EDWs have replaced some legacy on-premises systems. The following are some advantages of cloud EDWs:

Cloud EDWs provide speed and scalability that legacy systems cannot. Cloud computing provides the ability to scale rapidly to meet nearly any processing requirement. Using a few mouse clicks, administrators can scale processing and storage resources.

Compared to on-premises models, the EDW-as-a-service model requires little maintenance. The stakeholders will not have to worry about purchasing, setting up, and managing costly hardware and IT resources in-house. Service providers upgrade or replace system hardware.

The cloud offers a subscription-based pay-as-you-go model that is cost-effective. Subscriptions include automatic software updates.

Cloud EDWs have always-on, end-to-end data encryption and built-in data loss protection (accidental or malicious), and they adapt quickly to new security threats. A variety of compliance standards, such as SOC 1 and SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, and HIPAA, are also addressed by cloud EDWs.

EDWs built for high availability span multiple availability zones or data centers. In the event of a data center outage, work shifts to another available data center, and the disruption is not noticed by the end user.

A data warehouse solution can be deployed in three types of environments:

On-premises - a company purchases software and hardware for building and deploying an enterprise data warehouse, and then maintains it.

Hosted in the cloud by a company - This eliminates the need to purchase and maintain hardware and software for an enterprise data warehouse.

Hybrid - an enterprise data warehouse is augmented with a cloud-hosted repository.

READ MORE: Best 4 Cloud Data Warehouse Solutions In 2022