Emerging MDM Trends Part 3: MDM on Cloud

Emerging MDM Trends Part 3: MDM on Cloud

In the emerging trend series, So far I discussed Multi-Domain MDM and Integration of BPM with MDM.

This post hovers around the idea of deploying MDM system on Cloud.

Cloud computing is one of those few technologies which have gained equal share of positive and negative debates. Anything to go by the discussions on LinkedIn, articles and blogosphere, there are equal number people talking about pros and cons associated with cloud adoption. To summarize, cloud solutions bring enormous benefits in terms of cost savings, scalability, flexibility and improved accessibility. Along with these benefits come the challenges related to security, reliability and loss of control on your organization data and applications.

Running MDM on a Cloud is particularly interesting unlike other trends I discussed before because of challenges associated with cloud. Adoption of hosted services has always been infected with security issues. There has been increasing concern and demand for reliable and guarded platform and it is elementary when you think from organizations point of view. However, with MDM, this simple ask has become more demanding than ever before. In the backdrop of sensitive data breaches and highly regulated industry specific standards specifically for customer data, organizations are more worried about marrying these two technologies.

The main aspect in my opinion is the cultural shift which is needed to move to cloud. Not only MDM, but any application movement to the cloud requires great deal of behavior change on C-levels and employees. Justifiably so, organizations which already have cloud based applications will be the pioneers in pursuing cloud based MDM solutions as they would have passed the cultural changes required for this exercise.

Stumbled on this @StreamIntgrtn page about their hosted #dataquality & #MDM offerings (& it’s very cool thing to do) http://t.co/2BfsYL5peg

— Prash Chan (@MDMGeek) November 24, 2013

Interestingly, Gartner in its recent release of Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions, excludes hosted and cloud based MDM services because they are so new that they have yet to affect on-premises MDM deployments. Also, Gartner report points out the growing number of vendors showing high level of interest in creating cloud based MDM offerings. This includes a vendor who has nothing but a cloud based platform.

At this juncture, there are many hard to answer questions. For example, a comment on a recent LinkedIn discussion asks – Where would YOU choose to keep YOUR own corporation’s “Crown Jewels” (Customer Data)?

I tend to think, the benefits cloud computing brings are far higher than the concerns. And from here, it can only get better. We have to do good job at keeping our data out of harm’s way. Only then we can succeed in creating cloud based MDM solutions which are reliable and deliver consistent, trusted master data as service to organizations.

Thoughts?

COMMENTS

3 Thoughts on Emerging MDM Trends Part 3: MDM on Cloud

FX Nicolas

3 Dec 2013

3:51am

Nice Article Prashant! We see at Semarchy a lot of traction for Cloud MDM.

Customers use their Semarchy cloud instances to “get rid of the infrastructure”, and others use them to prove the value of the MDM to their C-Levels (and selling MDM) without having to invest into infrastructure and software in the first iterations. What we see is Cloud as “just” another architecture *choice* for MDM.

As you point out, there is still a lot of pushback due to security. Yet, things are moving.

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