CLOUD Analytics at the Tipping Point

Cloud has been a trend in Information Technology for almost a decade, but why are businesses just now making the change to CLOUD analytics?

The answer is that businesses need to be armed with the right insights at the right time to keep pace with customer expectations, market changes, and competition.

As businesses evolve and grow, leaders increasingly need agile, cost-effective, as well as reliable solutions to automate decision-making and analysis. Highly successful companies are creating an environment everyone from executives in the boardroom to front-line employees have the right data at their fingertips to help achieve greater success.

Informatica and IDG Research surveyed IT and business leaders from more than 400 companies in North America and EMEA to uncover market trends, as well as glean insights into how organizations are taking advantage of business analytics in the CLOUD. The survey indicated that CLOUD analytics adoption has reached a tipping point: 63% of respondents say they plan to investigate, analyze, or actively deploy CLOUD analytics solutions over the next twelve months. Additionally, 71% stated they expect to adopt a hybrid or CLOUD-only approach to analytics over the next three years.

The Business Drivers

CLOUD analytics can be defined as implementing one or more of the three primary components of business analytics – data integration, data warehousing, and BI – in the CLOUD.

The survey found 15% of respondents have already deployed one or more cloud analytics solutions.

What should IT professionals look for when choosing an offering? The majority, at 80%, of respondents say robustness of a CLOUD analytics solution’s data security framework is the most important. Tied with security is ease of use, followed by ease of ongoing administration, at 77%, data governance at 72%, and the ability to easily move data from one CLOUD location to another and across CLOUD and on-premises solutions at 64%.

Benefits

CLOUD analytics benefits eclipse those of on-premises analytics offerings. Respondents with deployed CLOUD analytics solutions cite the advantages of lower upfront costs at 60% over on-premises solutions, as well as greater agility and faster time to market by 57%, more rapid and cost-effective scaling for larger data sets at 55%, and self-service capabilities for non-technical users at 51%.

Use Cases

Of the survey respondents who said that their organizations are deploying, planning to deploy, or considering deployment of CLOUD analytics technologies over the next twelve months, the breakdown of adopted use cases highlight CLOUD Databases at 88%, followed by CLOUD BI tools at 87%, SaaS integrations at 86%, and CLOUD Data Warehouses at 84%

The Bottom Line

For an increasing number of companies, their center of gravity for mission-critical business data is moving to CLOUD applications. The transition for more-complex, inflexible, and expensive on-premises analytics to scale-able, easy-to-use, CLOUD-based models is under way and will increase significantly over the next few years.

Check out the full post over at Computerworld