Cloud computing is the ideal environment for processing big data. For databases that scale horizontally, sometimes with a million or more fields and reaching multiple petabytes in size, it's possible to chunk up the data and spread it across hundreds or thousands of servers for parallel processing and analytics. It's an efficient and effective use of cloud technology.
Of course, if you put data in the cloud, you will want to protect it with encryption, especially if the data includes any sensitive customer or financial information. However, the very thought of generating and managing all the encryption keys for hundreds of separate data files can be a problem. And, if your data is in a public cloud, you wouldn't want to give access to the keys to the root user, who is often an administrator for the cloud provider.

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