Small Investment, Big Insight: Cloud Analytics

Julian Quinn, Regional Vp, Asia Pacific, Qlik

Julian Quinn, Regional Vp, Asia Pacific, Qlik

For companies across all industries and sectors, business growth has always been at the forefront of priorities for key decision-makers. To reach targeted growth or goals, there are key factors that need to be taken into consideration. One that has become increasingly critical to success is the investment in technology, specifically big data and business analytics solutions. This is already evident in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, excluding Japan, with IDC forecasting a total spend of $13.6 billion into these solutions. Although the region has begun investing heavily in big data and business analytics solutions, IT leaders would agree that discovering the right solution to accomplish an instantaneous method of mining data for value is the biggest challenge.

One platform that can help organizations address the challenge and set the foundation for growth is cloud analytics. Investment in identifying the right solution to analyze multitudes of data from disparate data sources can be considerably hefty on a company’s finances. Through the right analytics platform, corporations can achieve their goals with small investments while realizing big insights. By 2018, IDC predicts that the cloud-based data analytics industry is set to double and reach $59.2 billion globally. Closer to home in Singapore, the Asia Cloud Computing Association’s Cloud Readiness Index ranks the nation as the second most ‘cloud ready’ country within the region. With the infrastructure available to host cloud, it makes better sense for companies to move into cloud analytics, especially as it can be seamlessly integrated with data visualization. Through analytics, seemingly disparate datasets can be linked in one single platform— providing a more visualized, holistic view of the data.

Discovering The Right Solution To Accomplish An Instantaneous Method Of Mining Data For Value Is The Biggest Challenge

Through this, employees are given the opportunity to intuitively draw associations, ask and answer their own questions, gain actionable data-driven insights, and work smarter.

To help companies make the right choice when considering a cloud analytics solution, below are three essential points to take note of:

Simplicity to engage is key

At the rapid rate that data is being shared, the best cloud solutions should be simple to roll-out, ensuring that firms waste no time in uncovering value within their data. Once the platform is ready, access should be made available from anywhere and at any given time. One should look for solutions that provide optimized experiences across all devices and host a full browser experience for greater flexibility. In addition, another key feature is that the solution is always up to date – this means no requirement of on-premise software installations, downloads or apps. By implementing a platform which requires minimal maintenance, teams or individuals across the entire organization can focus on the task at hand, which is to harness value-adding data.

Intuition not instruction

Navigating your data can be quite challenging, and even more so if the team must follow a set of guidelines as to what is accessible. The main word that I would emphasize here is ‘freedom’. Data exploration should follow your own line of thinking, not predefined questions. All your data should be available for search in all possible contexts so that you can freely explore and answer your own queries. Users should be able to intuitively explore data through association to gain useful insights that would potentially drive business forward. For example, searching data from a customer standpoint and linking to inventory data can uncover associated insights that can be leveraged to elevate business goals.

Governed and secured data

Lastly, another area that is often associated with data is security. When selecting a cloud analytics solution, it would be wise to consider the level of governance of that data provided. With a self-service platform, you would be able to control who has access to selected data sets and if needed, the solution should be flexible enough so that access can be granted immediately and on the go.

To put it simply, which ever cloud analytics solutions you end up going with, it should be easy to roll-out, flexible, and scalable with easy data sharing and deployment to enable your company to make better data-driven decisions.