Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released a new research report entitled Analytics in the Cloud, based on criteria defined by EMA business intelligence and data warehousing managing research director John Myers. This new research provides an up-to-date view of cloud-based analytics and business intelligence practices around the globe in terms of corporate business and technology strategy, actual project implementation attributes, and horizontal infrastructure choices.
To determine the status of analytics and business intelligence in the cloud, EMA embarked on a research study to examine the current state of cloud-based analytics. Based on a respondent pool of 257 business stakeholders and information technology professionals, this research dives deep, providing insights on cloud-based analytics, business intelligence strategies, and implementation practices.
Cloud-based solutions have been mainstream since Salesforce.com brought sales operations and customer relationship management to the “masses” in the 2000s. Cloud implementations have the advantage of providing faster time to provisioning and a significantly different cost structure from traditional software implementations. However, analytics and business intelligence in the cloud were slower to reach widespread acceptance. One reason is that analytical and business intelligence applications have very different data requirements from their traditional, operational counterparts. Analytical and business intelligence applications often require uniquely configured data schemas for individual organizations that can be more difficult to implement on a mass basis than for an operational solution. However, in 2014/2015, cloud-based analytical environments are now considered the same as (46%), if not better (38%), than on-premises solutions for functionality, time to implementation, and ease of adoption.
“It used to be that a cloud-based business intelligence option meant that you made a trade off in terms of functionality to compensate for the speed of provisioning,” said Myers. “Now cloud-based business intelligence solutions have caught up with analytical best practices and organizations don’t have to make a choice. They can have it all.”
Key findings in this study include:
- Cloud-Based Strategies Are Important – 56% of respondents identified their organization as having cloud-based analytics as Currently Adopted and Essential or Currently Adopted and Important in their organization.
- Not Just A Single Project – Over 40% of organizations indicated they had over five projects associated with their cloud-based analytics strategies.
- Locking Data Down – Security was the single most critical component (54.5% of respondents) to cloud-based analytics implementations, according to panel respondents.
- Speed and Dependability – After Security, respondents ranked Reliability, Performance, and Costs as the most critical components for cloud-based analytics implementations. Developer Support, Manageability, and Self-service and Vendor Brand were, relatively, the least critical components.
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