October 18, 2021
5 Ways in Which The Cloud Is Making Enterprise Data Analytics More Powerful
Data was and is still one of the most formidable assets for any business enterprise.
By adopting powerful data analytics tools and techniques, it lays the foundation of
data-driven operational models and decision-making that has proven to be more efficient,
accurate, and cost-effective.
Data analytics is also the foundation of advanced intelligence capabilities that
most enterprises seek to explore today with AI and machine learning being applied
to accelerate intelligent automation.
However, in its earlier days, data analytics remained largely relevant in bigger corporations
with deeper pockets and powerful computing infrastructure. Only they were able to garner
enough resources to build powerful analytical systems that drove transformative
enterprise-wide decision-making. That changed when cloud computing came into the picture.
Today, cloud computing empowers businesses of all sizes to run their analytical
workloads with ease and realize more ROI from their data initiatives. In fact,
studies estimate that the global cloud analytics market size will be worth
nearly USD 65.4 billion by 2025. But it is not just cost efficiency and
affordability that cloud computing brings to the fore in data analytics.
It has made enterprise data analytics more powerful than ever before.
Let’s see 5 ways how:
Unlimited Resource Scalability
It’s often true of enterprise analytics that success drives an acceleration in
analytics adoption. Business stakeholders become open to newer use-cases, wider
scope, and deeper application. But analytics is one of the most data-intensive domains
within the enterprise technology ecosystem. From storage to computing power and geographical
customization, there are multiple facets of resource utilization that need scaling up constantly
to meet business expectations of growth. Cloud computing makes it easier for enterprises to
scale their analytical infrastructure on-demand and with a variety of choices like private or
public or even hybrid models of deployment. Enterprises do not have to break the bank as the
cloud facilitates seamless scalability and availability of computing resources on demand.
Democratized Innovation
A cloud ecosystem enables multiple departments and data generation points within an
enterprise to connect and collaborate with a single source of truth in real-time. It becomes
easier for business users across functions, geographies, and touchpoints to access the data
insights and the solution ecosystem. Add to this, the ability of the cloud to offer high-performance
servers, customizable databases, and computing environments to speed up processing. It offers
unparalleled file sharing, secure file exchange, and configuration frameworks that allow even
employees working remotely to confidentially leverage analytical insights without having to move data
credentials into their local system. That makes analytics faster as well as more secure.
Faster, More Accessible, and Safer Analytics
An indirect consequence of cloud computing making data analytics universally accessible is the increased
focus on ideating and developing innovative analytics-led systems that cater to more unique or personalized
business scenarios. With more business users coming into the picture, analytical systems have a larger pool
of diverse data elements that can be studied and processed to create new predictive and operational models.
Innovative services build on cloud analytical capabilities may be initially seen as a curiosity or a
differentiating factor for the organization that launched it first. As the cloud improves access and promotes
scale, the technology often finds its way into the larger enterprise data analytics ecosystem and ultimately
helps in achieving wider collective results with greater positive impact.
Commoditizing Database Technology
One of the key challenges faced by traditional enterprises in maturing their digital innovations was the lack
of adaptability of their underlying database technologies. Database complexities often made it harder to
get leaders to submit to experiments with new real-time digital services. There was a very
real fear of the problems hidden in integrations between new technology solutions and
legacy systems and databases. Interoperability was seen as an unachievable ideal. With the
advent of cloud infrastructure, however, database technology became more versatile. From
storage to schemas and even custom services, cloud computing has transformed the database
into a commodity that multiple providers are able to offer to potential customers in
custom configurations and flexible frameworks for integration with new real-time
transactional applications. One of the best examples is the development of graph search
technology that leverages dedicated graph databases to power seamless search experiences
like the ones used in Facebook.
Diversification of Analytical Applications
The real value of analytics is realized when data scientists can quickly model and enable the
conversion of insights into actions in multiple business scenarios. With the data workloads moving
into the cloud, application development becomes more independent of the enterprise technology infrastructure
and offers more flexible integration options. Thus, enterprises can leverage multiple analytical capabilities
such as sales and marketing analytics, financial analytics, performance analytics, etc. to name a few. The
cloud also contains rich and powerful solution sets for each of these areas that the growing business can use.
The analytics solution can integrate better with these powerful enterprise tools due to their shared heritage.
This is an easy path to achieve digital transformation in an organic way.
As the digital economy advances, enterprises cannot afford to be slow or inflexible. The fact is their
competitors are already looking at every opportunity to turn customer data into tools that engage
them better. Hence it has never been more important to have a data-driven decision-making framework
powered by analytics within the business. The cloud makes building this analytical infrastructure
simpler and far more powerful as illustrated above. Get in touch with us to learn more about how the
cloud can power your business’s enterprise analytical aspirations seamlessly.