With interest in big data and cloud increasing around the same time, it wasn’t long until big data began being deployed in the cloud. Big data comes with some challenges when deployed in traditional, on-premises settings. There’s significant operational complexity, and, worst of all, scaling deployments to meet the continued exponential growth of data is difficult, time-consuming, and costly.

In the BigQuery Spotlight series, we talked about Monitoring. This post focuses on using Audit Logs for deep dive monitoring. BigQuery Audit Logs are a collection of logs provided by Google Cloud that provide insight into operations related to your use of BigQuery. A wealth of information is available to you in the Audit Logs. Cloud Logging captures events which can show “who” performed “what” activity and “how” the system behaved.

The right set of tools helps businesses utilize data to drive insights and value. But balancing a strong layer of security and governance with easy access to data for all users is no easy task. Retrofitting existing solutions to ever-changing policy and security demands is one option. Another option — a more rewarding one — is to include centralized data management, security, and governance into data projects from the start.

For decades, the technologies and systems that deliver analytics have undergone massive change. What hasn’t changed, however, is the goal: using data-driven insights to drive actions. Insight to action has been a consistent vision for the industry. Everyone from data practitioners to technology developers have sought this elusive goal, but as Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson points out, it has remained unfulfilled — until now.

Data teams across companies have continuous challenges of consolidating data, processing it and making it useful. They deal with challenges such as a mixture of multiple ETL jobs, long ETL windows capacity-bound on-premise data warehouses and ever-increasing demands from users. They also need to make sure that the downstream requirements of ML, reporting and analytics are met with the data processing.

The Cloudera Enterprise Data Maturity Report is a global survey of 3,150 business and IT decision makers assessing organizations’ maturity when it comes to their current capabilities and handling of data and analytics.