Analyzing external Big Data in the cloud makes more sense than bringing it in-house, says Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly. He outlined the reasons organizations should trust third party data with their cloud provider in his latest piece on the Wikibon blog.

The public cloud offers an optimal environment for testing proof-of-concepts, but moving sensitive corporate data to a provider’s remote facilities is an entirely different matter. Organizations prefer to keep data in their own private facilities because this option allows them to retain full control over their information, but Kelly says that the benefits of the cloud outweigh the drawbacks when it comes to Big Data from external sources.

He explains that because third party transactions created and stored outside an organization’s data center are in the cloud to begin with, it makes sense to keep them there. It less money and time to move a few terabytes of internal data to the cloud than moving petabytes of Tweets, Likes and other unstructured interactions to a corporate data center, he adds.

Kelly advises CIOs to “think seriously about deploying production-level Big Data projects in the public cloud when incorporating significant amounts of third-party data is involved. Perform a thorough cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the time and financial costs of identifying, integrating, and analyzing third-party data in both internal and cloud-based Big Data deployments. Do not, however, overlook the security and privacy implications of Big Data in the cloud and push cloud service providers to provide detailed accounts of security policies/capabilities in order to de-risk cloud deployments.”

Switch Communications’ Jason Mendenhall discussed the intersection of cloud and big data at this week’s Wikibon Peer Incite meeting, looking specifically at the growing options within Amazon’s cloud portfolio.  AWS’s public cloud offerings are increasing in appeal for the enterprise, where Big Data is becoming the prized path towards gaining a competitive advantage.  With that in mind, it’s also important to consider Amazon’s shortcomings when it comes to scalabile pricing, as well as its efforts to improve security capabilities for its public cloud services.

Indeed, AWS is an attractive ecosystem all its own.  Jaspersoft recently confirmed that the market shares Kelly’s and Mendenhall’s views on this subject when it made its flagship offering available on AWS a couple months ago, forging those all-important ties for Amazon’s efforts in the enterprise space.