It sometimes seems as if the industry produces a new option for storing the vast quantities of information that organizations are ingesting every other day, and last week was no exception. Microsoft Corp. took the lead with the launch of a new data warehousing service on its public cloud that offers a more cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premise systems.

That is owed to the fact that the platform allows storage to be scaled independently from processing power, the same pitch that landed a rivaling startup called Snowflake Computing Inc. $45 million earlier in the week. That means organizations with a lot of data but few users to support or vice versa can provision only what they require and avoid paying for unused resources.

That makes it a lot less cost-prohibitive to store the terabytes upon terabytes of data coming off the connected universe and other data sources that are being tapped for business insights in the enterprise. But organizing everything in a centralized repository for analysis is only the first step towards extracting the knowledge hidden inside the information.

The more challenging part is providing the results to the business users who need them with accuracy and in a timely manner, which is what Datameer Inc. is trying to address through the new addition to its business intelligence platform that debuted the day after Microsoft’s announcement. The pre-packaged analytics toolkit provides an interface for marketers to find patterns specific to their work.

Core metrics such as the best lead sources and conversion times are automatically displayed on a dashboard included in the bundle while deeper insights like which specific combinations of ads are most effective in attracting consumers can be gleaned with a few additional clicks. That’s same kind of granular visibility BitSight Inc. hopes to provide for security professionals using the $23 million in funding it raised last week.

The capital will go towards fueling the development of its threat intelligence service, which rates the security of an organization’s based on assessments of each and every system used in their environment coupled with internal metrics such as the average time to address anomalous behavior. The resulting score promises to help enterprises compare how their network protection shapes up against others in their market segment and identify areas for improvement.

Photo via Stan Dorsett