Cloud-based data analytics provides enterprises with valuable insights that can bring immediate improvements to a company’s productivity, giving them a competitive advantage over rivals and a comprehensive overview and understanding of their business operations. Here we examine how cloud analytics drives productivity across a business.
An overview of cloud analytics
Cloud analytics is a solution that enables enterprises to extract poignant information from enormous data sets. Using advanced tools and techniques, it undertakes detailed analysis and presents the resulting insights in easily digestible graphic formats, accessible online, that executives and managers can use to take the business forward.
A unified business view
An issue for many enterprises is that different internal departments will have differing perspectives on operations and strategies. This is often because data silos mean each department is basing its view on its own data sets. With no one having the big picture, it’s a challenge to find the best way forward or convince everyone around the table which direction to go.
Cloud analytics helps overcome this issue by unifying data from across the entire business so that everything can be taken into account during analysis and everyone can see the results. The storage capacity and processing power of cloud technology mean all data can be fed into the analytics process, enabling it to be analysed far quicker and more cost-effectively than achievable in-house and helping to speed up productivity.
Also beneficial is the fact that a cloud-based data management platform enables enterprises to blend data from different sources. In this way, it can be matched, merged and cleansed to provide information, insights and predictions that are significantly more accurate and valuable and which can be shared across the company to give everyone the true picture and, thus, a better basis for making progress with productivity.
Accessible and easy to understand insights
A cloud-based data management platform provides employees with unparalleled access to information and insights. Quick to deploy, unlike in-house apps, they speed up transformation and are far simpler for non-IT specialists to use, taking the burden off of IT staff and providing new opportunities for those without advanced IT skills. What’s more, as staff will no longer need to create one-time reports or log in to different systems to carry out analysis, these platforms are quickly accepted, their popularity increasing accessibility to analytics across the business. With more access to that data, the opportunity to be more productive is spread across the workforce.
Taking collaboration to a new level
Enterprises sometimes struggle to build effective collaboration systems, often relying on a mix of on-site and external tools that make it difficult to develop analytical models or share the findings. This can impede productivity, with teams often duplicating tasks and key individuals not getting a chance to contribute ideas effectively.
Such productivity barriers can easily be overcome using cloud technology. Collaborators, regardless of where they are based, can team up to curate the data they need, set up the most appropriate analytics designs and evaluate the results. Crucially, being cloud-based, team members will have access to the latest versions of synced files and real-time insights to help them make critical decisions quickly when the need arises.
A more secure home for data
The restrictive costs of implementing advanced security measures to protect systems and data has left many enterprises with in-house systems vulnerable to cyberattack. As a service provider, cloud vendors are required to put these measures into place. This is not just for the reassurance of their customers, but to meet the stringent regulations that vendors have to comply with. The result is that the public cloud is generally a far more secure place to store and analyse data compared to most in-house systems.
What compounds the issue is that aside from having less robust defences, on-site systems themselves are more prone to attack, with many companies reliant on legacy technology and software that have more vulnerabilities than the modern hardware and applications used in cloud data centres. These older systems also have a more complex architecture which makes them harder to monitor or defend.
Another area in which the cloud has a distinct advantage over in-house systems is that it enables enterprises to recover from disaster far quicker. Backups, disaster recovery and business continuity are key cloud services provided by vendors exactly for this purpose. What’s more, with their enormous storage capacity and swathes of geographically remote failover servers, even natural disasters can be withstood to ensure data is available and analytics can continue to improve productivity.
Conclusion
In today’s data-driven market, analytics is a key part of all business processes; from procurement to after-sales and everything between, it’s a key driver for improvement in productivity. Moving analytics to the cloud provides significant productivity advantages over doing it in-house, it offers a unified view of the company, makes data and insights more accessible and improves collaboration. In addition, the cloud also enhances data security and is more cost-effective.
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