The Shift
Cloud has been a “trend” in IT for nearly a decade. So why are businesses finally making the shift to cloud analytics now?
The answer is simple: 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, and 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.
At Informatica, we teamed up with IDG Research to survey IT and business leaders from more than 400 companies in North America and EMEA. We wanted to uncover market trends and glean insights into how organizations are taking advantage of business analytics in the cloud. The survey indicates 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 12 months. Additionally, 71% said they expect to adopt a hybrid or cloud-only approach to analytics over the next three years.
The Business Drivers
We define cloud analytics 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 (80%) of respondents say robustness of a cloud analytics solution’s data security framework is most important. Tied with security is ease of use, followed by ease of ongoing administration (77%), data governance (72%), and the ability to easily move data from one cloud location to another, and across cloud and on-premises solutions (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 (60%) over on-premises 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%).
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
12 months, the breakdown of adopted use cases highlight Cloud Databases (88%), followed by Cloud BI tools (87%), SaaS integrations (86%), and Cloud Data Warehouses (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 from more-complex, inflexible, and expensive on-premises analytics to scalable, easy-to-use, cloud-based models is under way and will increase significantly over the next few years.
Today, data is table stakes. To be competitive, successful businesses must transform disparate data streams into insights. That’s why cloud analytics is fast becoming the must-have solution for businesses around the world. Listen to the Informatica webinar for more information on what successful companies are doing and/or view this infographic on the study. Be in the driver’s seat to put your company ahead of the competition.