Small Investment, Big Insight: Cloud Analytics

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.