How Cloud Lends Strength to Data Analytics

The utility of analytics, the strength of Big Data or the efficiency of the cloud needs no more discussions. Like repetitive media reports, they keep playing over and over again, till all the eyeballs that needed to be caught are there, and  the subject itself arouses no curiosity.

Indeed, the topic of Big Data drives very little unique learnings or interest, because even if they are not using it, most enterprises are completely aware of its benefits. So there is data and there are technologies to facilitate its analysis. What is now to be discussed is, how do we use new technology and business paradigms like the cloud to make this analysis smarter, faster and more business savvy?

As Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India puts it,” Data is the new currency, analytics and business intelligence in the cloud is real. In order to be competitive and increase business, customers are looking for tools to address new opportunities, insights that can be meaningful and help prepare them to have a competitive advantage and eventually lead the market. Data is growing exponentially, there is an increased complexity on the types of data, all of this leading to a demand for tools that are intuitive and simple for customers that help derive insights from the data. The future lies in the solutions that will help businesses transform and impact their Industry. Analytics, here and now.”

Even with the super enthusiasm that enterprises are using while adopting the cloud, it’s not a simple, straight forward, plug and play solution. Technology and its availability (or lack of it thereof), is a very small part of the entire mindset change. Companies need to understand the business significance of adopting cloud analytics.

The biggest challenge to adoption is changing the silo’ed mindset of data collation in enterprises- the processes have to be transformed to become collaborative for workflow data, identifying what’s important and discarding what is not, working out the best way to capture data and the smartest way of structuring it. All these are new paradigms that organisations need to face and understand, right now. Of course, there are a few changes needed before the full benefit can be derived from this new technology business paradigm. Change can be an issue, especially if it challenges status quo, but often, the enterprise completely need to move ahead. Adoption of the cloud and using it for analysing data is definitely one of those times.

IS The CLOUD Ready FOR THE DATA AND APPS?

The cloud is no longer an emerging technology, and no one questions its adoption any more. The question that now comes up is, are enterprises utilising the cloud enough for business defined tools like analytics? Is the cloud doing its bit for this new business scenario, where data rules, technology only enables- in the real world? Says Garima Rai, Head of Marketing, Inside View technologies, “Saying that cloud-based applications are catching up would be a redundant claim. Cloud is already all over the place. Be it large enterprises or start-ups, or for that matter individuals, we breathe cloud day in and day out, and it has become an indispensable part of our routines. Today we are churning data at rates that were unheard of even two years back. However, this humongous volume of data is of little use unless converted into contextual insights and made accessible to the right people at the right time. The first part of the problem is addressed by analytics – which uses algorithms to slice and dice data and sieve usable insights from the extremely huge pool of data available at our disposal. The answer to the second part of the problem lies in cloud and apps – which ensure anytime, anywhere, device agnostic access to business critical information to key stakeholders.”

So, the ubiquity of the cloud and its ability to be accessible to the relevant stakeholders is the biggest advantage for using the cloud for Big Data and analytics. Companies are already expressing faith in what cloud does in the space (no pun intended). Says Atul Batra, CTO – Manthan Systems, “It is estimated that nearly 95% of all enterprises today are leveraging the cloud in some manner, across private, hybrid and public clouds.  Analytics is ideally suited for the cloud, since analytics infrastructure is highly compute, processing, storage intensive and the inherent scale, elasticity and performance associated with the cloud is a perfect match. Also, today data sources for analytics have expanded beyond traditional source systems behind the corporate firewall such as ERP, CRM, POS systems and such, to diverse external unstructured data sources including social, web/clickstream, IoT, etc. Hence it is easier to integrate all internal and external data sources from the cloud.”

He points towards another key technology trend with respect to analytics – the usage of big data infrastructure for running analytical workloads for management of large data sets. These include the crunching and processing of structured and unstructured data, running machine learning algorithms at scale as well as serving real-time analytics.  “Big data analytics on the cloud, purpose-built for specific industries and verticals, packaged as SaaS applications is today a mainstream trend globally. As an example, Manthan offers comprehensive SaaS based big data analytics solutions for retail/merchandising analytics, customer analytics and supplier collaboration and analytics,” he adds.