Big data in the open, private cloud

Organizations that take advantage of comprehensive insights from their data can gain a competitive edge. However, the ever-increasing amount of data coming in can make it hard to see trends. Adding to this challenge, many companies have data locked in silos, making it difficult—if not impossible—to gain critical insights. Big data technologies like Hadoop can help unify and organize data, but getting fast, meaningful insight still isn’t easy.

Organizations consistently face 4 main challenges when trying to implement big data initiatives:

1. Setting up and operating a big data and analytics platform
2. Attracting, managing, and applying big data and analytics skills
3. Integrating insights into business processes
4. Iterating quickly

Overcoming these challenges requires a new approach to big data: as a service. Applying cloud operating principles to big data can give you more flexibility, better resource utilization, higher scaling, and lower costs than traditional big data deployments. And, if you use a private cloud to host your big data platform, you can boost security and compliance and take advantage of internal network benefits.

Flexible, scalable, and cost-effective, OpenStack^® provides an ideal cloud foundation for big data platforms. As a leading contributor to the OpenStack project, Red Hat makes OpenStack safe, secure, and consumable for business use. Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux^® OpenStack Platform is commercially hardened and incorporates the enterprise-grade features, security, reliability, and support you need for business operations.

With big data science and industry-specific business process expertise, CSC integrates big data analytics software, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and Intel-based x86 servers into a comprehensive, hybrid cloud-based big data as a service offering. CSC Big Data Platform as a Service (BDPaaS) lets you get actionable insight from your data in as fast as 30 days—without needing deep expertise in big data platform development.

Supported and delivered as a service, CSC BDPaaS collects and centralizes data from any source and incorporates insights from that data into your business processes. Open platforms and commonly available, industry-standard components simplify deployment, improve flexibility, and reduce risk. The scalable, hybrid cloud architecture puts workloads to work where it makes the most sense for your organization—on-premise, in your private cloud, or even in a public cloud. Plus, security best practices are built in to help protect your data and insights.

CSC’s big data and industry experts customize each implementation to your unique environment and business needs. Additionally, many clients choose to engage CSC’s InsightLab. These professional services, including agile data science assistance, data engineering and integration, and data visualization, let you start taking advantage of your data faster and more effectively.

Many organizations across a variety of industries have successfully deployed CSC BDPaaS. Insurance, technology, logistics, media, advertising, healthcare, and manufacturing companies are benefiting from fast, integrated big data analysis. These customers are now able to enhance customer satisfaction, improve compliance, develop better products and services faster, with the goal of ultimately increasing sales. As an example, a leading US-based mutual insurance company was able to deploy a new, usage-based auto insurance offering to new states in half the time, while cutting big data operation costs by 50% and realizing more than 10% savings per account included in the program¹.

As you can see, there’s a better way to meet your big data initiatives. By applying cloud concepts to big data, CSC gives you a comprehensive, Red Hat-powered platform that’s quick to deploy, customized to your business, and more cost-effective than building and maintaining a platform in house. And, CSC offers a full set of tools and services to help you along the way, from planning to operation to adapting over time. If you’re ready to start making your data work for you—fast—visit csc.com/bigdataindex or contact your Red Hat sales team for an assessment.

¹Based on CSC-Red Hat client data, 2015