Many are realizing there is little to fear and much to gain from outsourcing data to cloud service providers, according to Tripp Smith (pictured), chief technical officer at Clarity Solution Group LLC (Clarity Insights).

“If you had money, you wouldn’t put it in your safe at home; you would put it in a bank,” Smith said, paraphrasing a speaker on cloud security at a session he attended during the Data Platforms event in Litchfield Park, Arizona.

Just as cloud service providers can invest in security to a degree that most businesses can’t, they can also devote more time and skill to data analytics, Smith stated during an interview with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Companies like Qubole Inc. cloud-native data-as-a-service provider, in addition to Clarity Insights, now make this proposition.

But why would a company not build its own data analytics engines with the available cloud building blocks?

“There’s also this aspect of administration and management and understanding how those integrate within an ecosystem that I don’t think, necessarily, every company’s going to be able to approach in the same way that a company like Qubole can,” Smith said.

Cloud service steroids

If companies allow cloud service providers to take some tasks out of their hands, they will find they are freer to work on innovating, serving customers and driving profits, Smith explained. Outsourcing tasks higher up the labor chain might yield bigger rewards if they are careful to choose a provider that knows what it’s doing, he added.

Many are trying to make a buck by implementing big data software, so a business must shoot further to be competitive. “My business may not be differentiated by my ability to operate and support [Apache Hadoop big data framework], but it’s really putting Hadoop to work in order to solve those business problems that makes me money,” he said.

Clarity Insights, like Qubole, offers data analytics as-a-service. To gain customers’ trust, collaboration is needed, according to Smith. It is important to work with the data engineers and business people more as partners than consumers, he stated.

“We focus this on being able to build a small, multi-functional team that can work directly with the business and then deliver [analytics] in real time in an interactive way,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Data Platforms 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Platforms 2017. Neither Qubole Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE