State Of Cloud Analytics In The Enterprise

• Cloud is an essential part of the analytics strategy of 70.1% of respondents, and 21.6% state that it is necessary as part of their analytics adoption.
• Highest levels of cloud adoption involve moving and storing data, through data integration (61.1%) and data warehousing (55.8%).
• 83.1% currently have mobile analytics implementations.
• Enterprises are on a cloud analytics adoption journey from collaboration to enhancing business processes and strategies.

These and many other fascinating insights are from The State of Cloud Analytics, 2016. You can download the report here (41 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Informatica and Deloitte sponsored the study with industry analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Based on interviews with 402 respondents, 25.6% of which are senior managers, followed by C-level executives (23.6%), and senior directors/directions (20.9%) in late 2016 the study provides insights into current and future adoption plans of cloud analytics. Additional details regarding the methodology are on pages 5, 39 and 40 of the study. “The key takeaways from our research is that cloud adoption is expanding quickly as companies find success with their first cloud analytics implementations and move to create more mature environments and drive broader adoption,” said Lyndsay Wise, Research Director, EMA.

Key takeaways of the study include the following:

• Enhancing business processes (23.5%), improving customer experience (22.2%), and better collaboration (19.1%) are the top three business drivers of cloud analytics adoption today. Line-of-business leaders and IT departments work together to define cloud analytics strategies that accelerate and improve business processes while staying in compliance with internal requirements. Gaining a competitive edge and R&D (14%), better analytics delivery (7.4%) and reducing capital expenditure (CAPEX) and overall costs (7.4%) are additional business drivers accelerating the adoption of cloud analytics.

• 60.1% of enterprises are relying on hybrid and public clouds as the platforms to enable Big Data Analytics, leading all other current analytics initiatives planned by respondents. 58.6% are relying on hybrid and public cloud platforms to enable self-service visual data discovery. Given Amazon Web Services’ leadership in databases and data warehousing services and technologies, the study’s finding of data warehouse modernization (29.6%) being the leading initiative on public cloud platforms reflects AWS’ market dominance.

• The more robust an enterprise becomes in their use of cloud analytics, the faster the need for self-service deployment options grows. The faster an enterprise matures in their use of cloud analytics, the more quickly they progress from collaboration to enhancing business processes and strategies. By definition, robust organizations are those who are engaged in five or more analytics projects. One of the key takeaways of this analysis is that self-service is the preferred strategy to scale cloud analytics across an enterprise once five or more projects are underway and delivering insights. Self-service is an enabler of greater global cloud analytics adoption.

• 83.1% of respondents currently have mobile analytics implementations. The study found that the expansion of cloud adoption and cloud storage options are making mobile deployments more accessible globally. This is consistent with nearly all previous cloud analytics studies, which consistently show enterprises struggle to serve their global workforces with actionable, contextually relevant data on a real-time basis.

• Reducing costs (19.5%), data security (15.1%) and collaboration (14.4%) are the top three technical factors driving cloud analytics. Three of the more common drivers cited in other surveys include improving agility (13.1%), worldwide access (12.6%) and scalability (11.2%). The study found that reduced software maintenance timeframes, reduced software maintenance costs, no software installation required led the cost reduction responses to the survey.

• The cost of Implementation (47.6%), Reduced Cost of Use (30.8%) and CAPEX/OPEX savings (21.3%) are the top three financial drivers enabling cloud analytics. The cost of implementation includes the reduced implementation costs and minimized hardware and infrastructure costs.

• The more robust the cloud analytics use in an enterprise, the greater the importance of data integration and data governance. As enterprises commit to more cloud analytics-based initiatives and strategies, the greater their prioritizing of integrating with legacy on-premise and private cloud databases. This finding is consistent with many other studies of cloud analytics adoption. Data integration and data governance are the cornerstones of creating a scalable, secure cloud-based infrastructure. Self-service enables enterprises with the most robust adoption of analytics to create data sources and models on the fly and gain greater value from their cloud analytics investments as a result.