Cloud data management software is a set of tools that organizes and manages data across several cloud platforms. It ensures that data is accurate, secure, and compliant throughout its lifecycle. A reliable cloud data management solution enables data sharing across on-premises and cloud storage that increases business intelligence initiatives. To help you select a suitable solution, I evaluated the top market solutions and identified their use cases.
Here are the six best cloud data management software and solutions:
- Informatica: Best overall cloud data management software
- Hevo Data: Best option for customer service and support
- NetApp BlueXP: Best for hybrid and multi-cloud environments
- Rubrik: Best for data security and industry standard compliance
- Snowflake: Best for third-party tools integration and support
- Airbyte Cloud: Best for ease of use and administration
Top Cloud Data Management Software Comparison
This table provides a summary of cloud data management solutions, including their essential features and the availability of free plans and trials.
| Big Data Management | Data Quality Management | Zero-ETL | Free Plan | Free Trial | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Informatica | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | 30 days |
| Hevo Data | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | 14 days |
| NetApp BlueXP | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | 30 days |
| Rubrik | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | Contact sales |
| Snowflake | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | 30 days |
| Airbyte Cloud | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | 14 days |
✔️=Yes ❌=No/Unclear
All of the solutions listed here excelled in specific categories, but Informatica emerged as our overall winner, with its wide range of core capabilities plus a free plan offering. Continue reading to learn about each solution’s features, pros and cons, and alternatives, or see how I evaluated each top solution below.
Informatica – Best Overall Cloud Data Management Software
Overall Rating: 4/5
- Core features: 4.8/5
- Pricing and transparency: 3.5/5
- Data security: 4/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 3.5/5
- Customer support: 3.8/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.1/5
Informatica, an AI-powered cloud data management solution, tops our list with a broad product portfolio focusing on data integration, quality, cataloging, and governance. It combines data from multiple sources to enable seamless analysis and reporting. Informatica provides thorough extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities to ensure effective data warehousing. It’s most suitable for enterprises looking for a feature-rich and versatile data management solution.
Pros
Cons
- Free Cloud Data Integration: Supports 20M rows per 10 compute hours per month
- Free Data Loader: Supports unlimited users
- Contact for quote: Volume-based and other pricing models available
- Free trial: 30 days
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- CLAIRE AI engine: Optimizes expenses and performance by analyzing over 35 petabytes of data, improving discovery, productivity, and insights.
- Intelligent data management cloud administrator: Manages user access, monitors usage via dashboards, and sets consumption threshold warnings to reduce costs.
- Informatica data quality (IDQ): Improves and maintains data quality by detecting and deleting corrupted, inaccurate, duplicate, or incomplete information.
- Data catalog: Offers an AI-powered, collaborative platform for identifying, documenting, and curating data assets for a variety of applications, including analytics.
- Compliance certifications: Include SOC, DPIA, FedRAMP, HIPAA, Cloud Security Alliance, and other standards that ensure regulatory compliance.
Informatica provides free data management tools, but users must perform some upkeep themselves. Consider exploring Airbyte for full cloud maintenance.
Hevo Data – Best Option for Customer Service & Support
Overall Rating: 3.9/5
- Core features: 4.3/5
- Pricing and transparency: 3.4/5
- Data security: 3.5/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 4.2/5
- Customer support: 4.2/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.3/5
Hevo Data, an automated zero-maintenance data platform, unifies data from over 150 sources in near real time via an easy-to-use no-code user interface. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures 100% data correctness, 99.9% uptime, and fast system alarms — all backed by responsive 24/7 customer assistance and a five-minute response time via Live Chat support. Hevo uses models and workflows to quickly make data analytics-ready.
Pros
Cons
- Free plan: Supports up to 5 users per 1 million events per month
- Starter: $239 per 5 million events per month
- Professional: $679 per 20 million events per month
- Contact for quote: Business Critical plan available
- Free trial: 14 days
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- Data reliability: Provides a fault-tolerant architecture with no data loss, low latency, end-to-end encryption, and compliance with important security certifications.
- Data integration: Supports over 150 plug-and-play connectors for seamless interaction with SaaS apps, databases, file systems, and more.
- Automated schema management: Automatically syncs the destination schema to match changes in the source data and maintain consistency.
- Data control: Involves cleaning, formatting, standardizing, or filtering data in real time without affecting load performance.
- Compliance certifications: Meets GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type I and II, and ISO standards for fundamental cloud security and privacy compliance.
Hevo Data provides a free plan but its paid plans can be more expensive than other options. If you actively manage your usage, Snowflake’s usage-based pricing, which has lower rates per credit, may be more appropriate for your budget and demands.
NetApp BlueXP – Best for Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Environments
Overall Rating: 3.8/5
- Core features: 4.1/5
- Pricing and transparency: 2.2/5
- Data security: 4.3/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 4.7/5
- Customer support: 3.5/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.5/5
NetApp BlueXP, formerly NetApp Cloud Data Sense, uses AI-powered technologies to improve data governance in hybrid and multi-cloud systems. It provides a SaaS-based unified control plane to enhance your visibility and control. BlueXP unifies data services and provides a flexible, secure infrastructure with robust AIOps capabilities, making it best for navigating complicated hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes.
Pros
Cons
- Pay-as-you-go: $0.05 per GB per month via Marketplace
- 12-month subscription: $0.04 per GB per month via Marketplace
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP Optimized: $0.030 per GiB per month
- Contact for quote: Specialized plans and add-ons available
- Free trial: 30 days
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- Cloud storage management: Facilitates the centralized deployment, discovery, and management of ONTAP-based storage across first and third-party clouds.
- NetApp cloud insights: Delivers extensive visibility into infrastructure and apps, allowing for informed decision-making and optimization.
- Data classification: Uses artificial intelligence to identify, profile, and categorize data, improving governance, privacy, and operational insights.
- Unified control: Provides a single interface for managing integrated data services and flexible resource usage across hybrid multi-cloud settings.
- Compliance certifications: Cover GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, CCPA, Common Criteria, and more.
While NetApp BlueXP works best in multi-cloud environments, some users have reported encountering challenges with NetApp maintenance and updates. Consider Airbyte Cloud for easier administration.
Rubrik – Best for Data Security & Industry Standard Compliance
Overall Rating: 3.8/5
- Core features: 4.3/5
- Pricing and transparency: 1.2/5
- Data security: 4.7/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 5/5
- Customer support: 3.9/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.3/5
Rubrik, a key player in data security and compliance, largely focuses on cyberattack prevention through comprehensive backup, data protection, threat analytics, and cyber recovery solutions for different infrastructures and cloud environments. Its encryption capabilities ensure data integrity and regulatory compliance. These are backed up by secure coding methods and independent verification of compliance, security, and privacy requirements.
Pros
Cons
- Contact for quote: Foundation, Business, and Enterprise editions available
- Free trial: Contact to request
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- Unified data protection: Simplifies administration and improves visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud systems.
- Risk mitigation: Uses immutable snapshots and encryption to combat ransomware, ensuring data integrity and speedy recovery from outage.
- Cloud archival: Stores structured and unstructured data in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud for low-cost long-term storage.
- Zero trust data protection: Offers improved security for online backups, including strong encryption techniques.
- Compliance certifications: Adheres to GDPR, CCPA, ISO, SOC 2 and 3, HIPAA, Common Criteria, and more.
Rubrik’s free trial availability isn’t disclosed, so you may need to contact the sales team for information. For more accessible cloud data management free trials, check out Hevo Data’s free solutions and 14-day trial or NetApp’s 30-day trial.
Snowflake – Best for Third-Party Tools Integration & Support
Overall Rating: 3.7/5
- Core features: 4.5/5
- Pricing and transparency: 3/5
- Data security: 4/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 3.4/5
- Customer support: 2.7/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.3/5
Snowflake specializes in third-party tool integration and support, providing a scalable data cloud platform for application development, data warehousing, and lakes. It offers unified security, governance, and metadata management, which reduces ETL complexity. Snowflake also works with leading data management partners to ensure smooth integration and improve data consistency across analytics projects from various sources.
Pros
Cons
- Standard: $2 per credit, depending on location, via AWS
- Enterprise: $3 per credit, depending on location, via AWS
- Business Critical: $4 per credit, depending on location, via AWS
- On-demand storage: $23 per TB per month
- Contact for quote: Virtual Private Snowflake and other plans available
- Free trial: 30 days
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- Data integration: Facilitates transformation during or after loading, including preparation, migration, mobility, management, and warehouse automation.
- Business intelligence (BI) tools: Allows for more informed decision-making via data visualization tools such as dashboards and charts analysis, discovery, and reporting.
- Snowflake Partner Connect: Makes it easy to create trial accounts with Snowflake partners while seamlessly integrating third-party tools and services.
- Snowsight: Provides a uniform web interface for SQL or Python-based data operations, as well as Snowflake deployment management.
- Compliance certifications: Include ISO 27001, SOC 1 and 2, FedRAMP, PCI DSS, and other industry standards for data security and compliance.
Snowflake integrates with a wide range of third-party solutions, although the administration may require additional effort. Check out Airbyte for a more user-friendly experience.
Airbyte Cloud – Best for Ease of Use & Administration
Overall Rating: 3.6/5
- Core features: 4.5/5
- Pricing and transparency: 2.7/5
- Data security: 3.2/5
- Cloud data governance and compliance: 4.5/5
- Customer support: 2.4/5
- Ease of use and administration: 4.5/5
Pros
Cons
- Airbyte Cloud: $115 per 10 GB data in 1 million rows per month
- Contact for quote: Team and Enterprise plans available
- Free trial: 14 days
- Free demo: Contact to schedule
- Observability and alerting: Use email or webhook notifications to actively monitor data pipeline issues to ensure rapid answers and proactive usage tracking.
- Intuitive UI: Simplifies onboarding and scaling using API or Terraform, lowering operational costs as your company grows.
- Change data capture (CDC) feature: Detects source data changes and guarantees consistent replication across various systems to maintain data integrity.
- PyAirbyte: Enables advanced data integration using Airbyte’s Python library, integrating existing connectors easily.
- Compliance certifications: Adheres to ISO 27001, SOC, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA for information safety and regulatory compliance.
Airbyte has an active community; however, it lacks live chat for quick customer support and updated documentation for self-help. Try Hevo Data for better customer support, including 24/7 assistance and an extensive documentation portal.
Top 5 Features of Cloud Data Management Software
The best cloud data management software come with features such as zero-ETL capabilities, which allow for seamless data integration without the need for traditional ETL processes. They also feature powerful tools for handling massive amounts of data, incorporate AI for quick data extraction, enable disaster recovery to provide data resilience, and provide full data quality management to assure accuracy and reliability throughout the data lifecycle.
Zero ETL
Zero-ETL is a new approach in which data is integrated in real-time or near-real-time, minimizing the period between data collection and availability for analysis. Transformation occurs during querying, which eliminates the need for staging locations. This strategy allows enterprises to evaluate and query data straight from the source, increasing efficiency by avoiding traditional, time-consuming ETL operations.
Big Data Management
Big data management entails organizing, administering, and managing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. It enables businesses and governments to manage terabytes to petabytes of data saved in multiple formats. It uses centralized interfaces to manage data resources, improve outcomes, ensure security, and increase analytics using efficient cycle procedures and visualization approaches while allowing multiple concurrent users.
AI Integration
Integrating AI into data management software means strategically deploying AI that enhances data quality and analytics. It includes techniques for efficiently collecting, organizing, storing, and utilizing data while assuring its integrity, accessibility, security, and compliance. It facilitates automation to improve data handling, easily support regulatory compliance, and accelerate processes to enable informed decision-making.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery services in data management ensure business continuity and resilience. They include developing backup systems, storing data off-site, and providing redundancy to reduce the impact of system failures. These safeguards protect against unforeseen disruptions and data loss, allowing activities to resume swiftly without extended downtime.
Data Quality Management
Data quality management ensures accuracy and reliability by integrating data collection, enhanced processing, and effective delivery. It takes administrative oversight to ensure data integrity, which is required for consistent and reliable data analysis. High-quality data is critical for generating actionable insights and assuring the precision of information utilized in your decision-making and strategic planning.
How I Evaluated the Best Cloud Data Management Software
I created a scoring rubric to evaluate the top cloud data management solutions based on six fundamental criteria. Each criterion has specific subcriteria or features listed under it. Then, I assessed if the product meets the specific features or services listed. Based on their scores per criterion, I determined each solution’s use case. Ranking their overall scoring, I identified the best six solutions, with the top scorer as our overall winner.
Evaluation Criteria
In my assessment, I prioritized the core characteristics necessary in evaluating cloud data management software. Next, I looked into their pricing and transparency and data security capabilities. I reviewed their cloud compliance and data governance to ensure regulatory compliance. Finally, I assessed customer assistance, ease of use, and administration to determine the user experience and operational efficiency.
- Core features (25%): Include zero ETL, big data management, data distribution, file sharing, disaster recovery, data quality control, unlimited storage for scalability, and AI integration for advanced analytics and automation.
- Criterion winner: Informatica
- Pricing and transparency (20%): Considers aspects like free trials, price structures, transparent pricing information, availability of free plans or tiers, free demos, and data egress fees.
- Criterion winner: Informatica
- Data security (20%): Covers additional security elements like cloud security policies, risk assessments, threat analysis, IAM integration, encryptions, endpoint security, and more.
- Criterion winner: Rubrik
- Cloud data governance and compliance (15%): Reviews the conduct of internal and external audits, resource and service governance, and adherence to key industry standards.
- Criterion winner: Rubrik
- Customer support (10%): Assesses the availability of support platforms like live chat, phone, and email assistance, manuals, demos, training, and user reviews to assess customer service quality.
- Criterion winner: Hevo Data
- Ease of use and administration (10%): Evaluates the UI, centralized management console, intuitive functionalities, workflow integrations, CSP maintenance, and user reviews for ease of use.
- Criterion winner: Airbyte Cloud
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What Are the Common Challenges in Using Cloud Data Management Software?
Using cloud data management software might present issues, such as data egress prices imposed by providers when transferring or restoring data, which are designed to discourage data removal. Also, despite the cloud’s cost-effective brand, keeping huge amounts of data in cloud data lakes or databases can be expensive. This can affect your budgeting and data management techniques.
What’s the Difference Between Cloud Data Management & Traditional Data Management?
Traditional data management relies on on-premise hardware and IT infrastructure, which limits scalability and increases upfront expenses. Cloud data management makes use of cloud platforms to enable dynamic scalability, improved disaster recovery, and flexible data access without requiring large infrastructure expenditures to boost data agility.
What Are the Common Compliance Standards in Securing Cloud Data?
Here are some of the key data compliance regulations and standards for securing cloud data:
- SOC 1: Focuses on internal controls over financial reporting.
- SOC 2: Evaluates data security, availability, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
- HIPAA: Protects health information privacy and security.
- GDPR: Safeguards EU residents’ personal information.
- CCPA: Provides Californians with control over their personal information.
- PCI DSS: Ensures the secure handling of credit card information.
- ISO/IEC 27001: Governs information security.
- FedRAMP: Standardizes security for cloud services that interact with federal agencies.
Bottom Line: Securely Manage Your Cloud Data
Cloud data management makes data handling easier for both organizations and individuals. It maintains huge volumes of data on the cloud, adjusting to changing business needs with a diverse set of software and technologies available. When choosing the best solution, align your business needs with the software features, then take advantage of its free trials or plans to test its functionalities to make sure it seamlessly fits your business operations.
Employ a cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool to add another layer of security to your cloud data management solution.
