Cloud analytics is on the radar of the IT decision makers

BANGALORE, INDIA: A new global survey by Informatica conducted among the IT and business decision makers in North America and Europe indicates that cloud analytics adoption has reached a tipping point.

About 63% of respondents saying that over the next 12 months they will be investigating, analyzing or actively planning to deploy cloud analytics solutions. Additionally, 71% said they expect to adopt a hybrid or cloud-only approach to analytics over the next three years.

Defined as implementing one or more of the three primary components of business analytics—data integration, data warehousing and BI—in the cloud, cloud analytics has emerged as the answer to extracting increased value from today’s expanding set of internal and external data sources in order to enhance insight and enrich decisions for employees in every line of business.

The survey reveals a rapidly accelerating market for cloud analytics solutions, where early adopters are already achieving significant business value.

Cloud analytics adoption is being driven primarily by escalating end user requirements for improved analytics – This includes improved quality and consistency of data across systems (77%), improved ways to visually explore data (72%) and real-time data aggregation and analysis (70%).

Adoption is also being driven by the need to access an expanding range of data sources, both cloud and on-premise – Survey respondents cited the need to analyze data from on-premise applications (56%), on-premise data warehouses (54%), cloud data warehouses (45%) and SaaS applications (43%). Support for big data sources is another specific demand (63%).

Cloud analytics is fast becoming mainstream – Respondents with cloud analytics projects in the works or on their radar have, on average, 15 analytics projects underway or in planning in the next 12 months. Of those projects, 46% will involve the use of cloud analytics solutions.

Early adopters are already deploying robust data frameworks – 15% of respondents have already deployed one or more cloud analytics solution, including such foundational technologies as cloud databases (75% among respondents who have deployed any cloud analytics solutions), cloud data integration (71%) such as Informatica Cloud, and cloud data warehousing (54%).

Cloud analytics benefits are eclipsing those of on-premise analytics offerings – Respondents with deployed cloud analytics solutions cite the advantages of lower upfront costs (60%) over on-premise solutions, as well as greater agility and faster time to market (57%), more rapid and cost-effective scaling for larger data sets (55 %) and self-service capabilities for non-technical users (51%).

Current use cases are broad – Surveyed organizations with deployed cloud analytics solutions are using them for a wide variety of purposes, including incorporating analytics into CRM, SCM and other operational applications (41%), achieving faster time to value for analytics projects (40%), analyzing cloud data sources such as SaaS, social and IoT (39%), and hybrid data warehousing (39%), among others.

Top 5 solution evaluation criteria – Respondents identified numerous key evaluation criteria for buying a cloud analytics solution. The top five are robustness of data security framework (80% rating this as critical or very important), ease of use (80%), ease of on-going administration (77%), ability to integrate on-premise and cloud data (77%), and ability to reconcile/cleanse data (75%). These were followed closely by availability of implementation resources and speed of implementation.