Global Analytics Cloud Market -- Benefits and Importance for Enterprises Organizations are now comfortable sharing business data with providers of cloud tech, something that was a security and integrity concern in the early days of the cloud
By Salman Khan
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The global cloud analytics market is expected to grow from US$11.272 billion in 2017 to US$37.816 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 22.35% during the mentioned period. This is greater than the CAGR for any other market. The potential of this market is driving technology leaders, who are primarily in the digital experience/transformation space, to invest in cloud analytics.
The driving force behind cloud analytics is the fact that in the internet era, data is being generated in abundance but if it is not structured and analysed it won't benefit a business. Analysing data using the cloud is a cost-effective solution. Otherwise, the software and hardware required to analyse data prove to be very expensive. The primary offering of analytics cloud is software as a service (saas). There are companies that offer cloud-based platforms to analyse companies data. Most of these analytics platforms inject an agent (Script) into the code which keeps sending information to the server where this collected data is analysed. The type of data shared, privacy and security of data and other concerns are topics for another article.
Importance of Cloud Analytics
The importance of analytics, in general, is well proven. For example, web analytics enables marketing departments to improve websites, attract more users, target audiences, and create a more meaningful and personalised content. On the other hand, data analytics helps businesses make sound decisions, predict the behaviour of buyers, understand demand and supply and much more.
Cloud analytics has gained popularity rapidly, especially over the last decade. One of the major reasons behind this is that the cloud, in general, is quite useful. Organizations are now comfortable sharing business data with providers of cloud technology, something that was a security and integrity concern in the early days of the cloud. Cloud analytics is essential because analysing data on a business's premises will create scalability issues as the data amount of data generated is unpredictable.
Benefits of Cloud Analytics
To understand the benefits of cloud analytics, we must compare it with on-premise analytics. The first benefit organizations notice is the lower cost of cloud analytics. For an average web/core application, the processing power needed to analyse the data generated demands high-end hardware, tremendous memory, processing, and many cores, etc. Maintaining such hardware comes with its own cost. Finding people with the right skillset and other resources for maintenance is also difficult.
The second benefit organizations notice is the rapid time to market. It is needless to mention that having cloud-based software do a job is much faster than setting up an entire environment from scratch. In the case of the latter organizations would need to install hardware, software, connect applications, and create dashboards and so on. Cloud analytics just needs to connect with an application and starts analysing right away.
The third benefit organizations notice is the simplicity of cloud analytics. Those who have worked with any cloud analytics platform agree that even a non-technical resource can connect an application to the analytics cloud and enjoy the benefits of analytics. Almost all cloud analytics platforms have an online dashboard that has very intuitive visualizations. The console for managing services, data consumption, and other administrative tasks are made much simpler.
And the fourth benefit of cloud analytics is its scalability. This is one of the most important benefits. The true reason behind the success of a cloud platform is the ability to scale up or down. Concerning analytics, it is crucial to think ahead of time and be ready for an exponential increase in the volume of data generated. Analysing data on-premises is a very challenging task as growth in the volume of data generated is hard to predict. On the other hand, when this task is given to a cloud service provider, organizations can scale up when data spikes and scale down when there is an off business day.
In summary, cloud analytics is cheaper, simpler, faster and scalable. Organizations that use cloud analytics benefit from the insights generated by cloud analytics. Suppose a business's product or service has huge potential in an untapped market, cloud analytics will uncover this. It can also help a business uncover different price points to sell its products or services so that more revenue is generated. Furthermore, it can help organizations reach more consumers and provide insights into designing new and more profitable products and services. All this requires a huge amount of processing power, memory, and powerful software which is available only by providers of cloud analytics. Hence the cloud analytics is the most recommended approach among the architect community for many organizations to remain competitive in a world where data is the oxygen for every business.
