Informatica says that a new independent research report has found that cloud analytics is now not only mainstream but also well on the way to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics. The report, entitled “The State of Cloud Analytics 2016,” reveals that cloud is a key part of the analytics strategy of 70.1 per cent of surveyed organisations, while an additional 21.6 per cent stated that it is an important part of their analytics adoption.
This new Informatica and Deloitte-sponsored research was produced by leading industry analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). EMA’s research was conducted at the end of 2016 across 402 business and technology leaders around the world.
Among the findings, the new research reveals that cloud analytics has now reached parity with on-premise analytics in terms of adoption. Today’s analytics implementations are split almost equally between on-premise and cloud (either hybrid or public cloud) environments, with most respondents hoping to expand their cloud implementations going forward.
The research also spotlights the immense importance of governed self-service to cloud analytics. An overwhelming 94.8 per cent of respondents believe that governed self-service is a key strategy for their organisations’ analytics implementations. In fact, the more committed an organisation is to cloud analytics, the more valuable self-service capabilities become in areas such as data management and specifically data governance as analytics users seek increasing levels of agility.
Key findings
Cloud analytics is well past the tipping point and is now top of mind – Cloud is a key or important part of the analytics strategy of 91.7 per cent of respondents.
Cloud analytics adoption is being propelled by vital business needs – The top three business drivers for cloud analytics were identified as enhancing business processes (23.5 per cent), consumer experience (22.2 per cent), and better collaboration across teams and suppliers (19.1 per cent).
Adoption is also being propelled by cost – Respondents identified cost reduction (19.5 per cent) as their foremost technical driver for moving analytics to the cloud. In terms of financial drivers, cost of implementation/adoption was identified as the primary monetary benefit (47.6 per cent).
Security is both a technical driver and an obstacle – Data security was identified as the second leading technical driver for cloud analytics adoption (15.1 per cent). Yet, security and compliance was viewed as the top obstacle to implementing in the cloud (40 per cent). However, fear of security issues lessened (by 5 per cent) among respondents with more mature cloud implementations.
Robust integration and migration capabilities are vital – The second leading obstacle to adoption was identified as integration and migration (34.6 per cent), pointing to the critical importance of full-featured, self-service data integration tools.
Organisations are driving insight through broader access to self-service solutions – Organisations with robust cloud analytics capabilities are powering faster insights and increased business user agility through governed self-service for data integration (84 per cent), data mapping (83 per cent), data modelling (82 per cent), and data governance (77 per cent).
