How Cloud Analytics Benefits Organisations

As businesses evolve and grow, leaders increasingly feel the need for agile, cost effective and reliable solutions to automate decision-making and analysis. Highly successful companies are creating an environment where the right data is at finger tips of executives in the boardroom to front-line employees to help achieve greater success.

Says Moshe Kranc,Chief Technology Officer, Ness Software Engineering Services (SES), “The benefits of the Cloud for hosting data and applications are very compelling:

• Low entry cost: Access to computer resources without having to purchase hardware or install/maintain software.
• High availability, high quality of service. The Cloud provider usually knows more about IT than you do
• Broad network access: services/data can be accessed from anywhere
• Scalability: (Theoretically) infinite scalability
• Rapid elasticity: It is very easy to scale the resources up or out at any time.
• Self-service: easy to instantiate, easy to use, easy to tear down

As a result of these benefits, more and more companies have plans to migrate at least some of their applications and data to the Cloud.”

One IDG Research service study along with Informatica that studied more than 400 companies in North America and EMEA, trying to track market trends on enterprise adoption of cloud analytics showed some interesting results. According to the survey, 63% of the respondents are positive about deploying cloud for analytics over 2016, while 71% were planning to deploy a hybrid cloud or cloud only adoption for analytics, maximum by 2018.

The drivers to this adoption- ease of use topped the charts with ease of governance and seamless movement of data came next. So, essentially, the three components of Business analytics- data integration and warehousing and BI, are now fast moving into the cloud for a large number of enterprises worldwide.

What benefits do these companies identify? The topmost benefit cited was lower costs of infrastructure which the cloud naturally provides.  Agility and faster time to market of strategies come a close second and of course, scalability also was cited as a top advantage.

Moshe Kranc adds, “Analytics by its nature requires large amounts of compute power for short time periods. For example, at the end of the month, billions of revenue records must be aggregated based on revenue source and date. Once those aggregations are calculated, they can be looked very quickly by any process building a report. This kind of bursty activity is perfect for the Cloud. Instead of purchasing enough on premise equipment to handle the high-water mark of needed computational power, run that aggregation in the Cloud, using as many computers as needed, for a short period of time. Then, store the results in a key-value store that requires far less computing resources.”

It’s not just a matter of cost savings, he maintains, “The Cloud’s ability to provide potentially infinite computing resources for short bursts of time enables new sorts of calculations that were previously considered unfeasible.  For example, many social network calculations require instantiating an in-memory graph that contains many terabytes of data. Thanks to the Cloud, the resources needed to perform these calculations are available to all.”

And to top all of these, the fact that almost all business applications are rapidly moving to the cloud and companies cannot afford to keep analytics out of it. As Mahesh, H Nayak Chief Operating Officer, SAP Labs India says, “Today most of the mainstream applications and related data are already available in cloud, hence business intelligence and data analysis cannot be far behind.”The transition to scalable, off premise cloud based IT infrastructure is not in future tense any more, it’s happening as we speak.