A while ago the trend of having the possibility to deploy a Master Data Management (MDM) solution in the cloud was covered in the post The Rise of Cloud MDM.
The latest Gartner MDM Magic Quadrant report has some numbers on that trend as mentioned in the post Who Will Make the Next Disruption on the MDM Market? Cloud based deployment has increased from 19% in 2017 year to 24 % in 2018 among Gartner’s respondents. While the organizations included here are the larger ones, I will guestimate that the cloud portion of MDM implementations are higher among midsize and smaller organizations.
As mentioned in the Gartner report there are however some confusion about what a cloud MDM solution really is. Does it come as SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)? In this spectrum the vendor will provide most things in a SaaS solution, lesser stuff as PaaS and only the ability for the software to be hosted somewhere out there as IaaS.
One “as a Service” component in relation to master data you could expect in SaaS, but not necessarily in IaaS, is DaaS (Data as a Service) as for example out-of-the-box address verification and business directory integration services. A common address verification service is the one from Loqate, while Informatica though have their own solution based on their AddressDoctor acquisition. The most common business directory provider is Dun & Bradstreet.
Else the difference follows the general difference between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS which is about what the organization has to do themselves (or through system integrators) around software updates, configuration, maintenance, monitoring and more.
On the brink to 2019 my guess is that we will see more MDM in the cloud next year as well as a movement from IaaS over PaaS to SaaS. This will include more DaaS covering more master data domains not at least in the product data space – a reason of being for the Product Data Lake service I am involved with.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 