Despite all the metaphors of cloud computing being a lofty topic, the reality is that in many organizations, cloud solutions have been hidden in the bowels of IT or pursued quietly by various business functions, such as sales or HR. And generally, the bulk of enterprise cloud discussions to date have fallen into two categories: cloud computing platforms (the darling of IT operations and data center geeks) and cloud applications (beloved by business users, rogue or otherwise).

However, there is a third aspect to cloud computing that is zooming to prominence: cloud data. Data has now elevated cloud computing to a boardroom discussion. Why? Companies are chasing data like never before, looking to wield it to outsmart their competitors through approaches including big data and predictive analytics. But, the proliferation of cloud data has become overwhelming, yielding the data equivalent of "water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink."

Cloud computing has certainly changed the economics of IT. Many IT groups have delighted in the ability to migrate their data centers to the cloud via Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities offered by companies, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. But, while this made many IT groups far more efficient and cost-effective, few business executives really cared. Now, PaaS vendors are extending beyond basic compute platforms to massively disrupt the data processing market, with offerings such as AWS Redshift and the recently announced Aurora.

This shift goes hand-in-hand with the rise of cloud analytics. Only nine months ago, cloud analytics was a niche segment, with any person who was serious about "big data" focused on building massive Hadoop/NoSQL clusters and hiring a bunch of data scientists. Given that most enterprise data still resided on-premise, it just didn't seem practical to move all that data into the cloud for analytics.
The tipping point is now here.

. First, the center of gravity of enterprise data is inexorably shifting toward the cloud due to increasing adoption of cloud applications and cloud computing.