Analytics and business intelligence platforms are important tools that help companies make sense of their data. As more companies use cloud services, cloud-based analytics platforms have become very popular. However, cloud analytics platforms are not all the same in what they can do and how well they work. Some key things make the most powerful and useful cloud analytics platforms stand out from the rest.
Flexible and Scalable Infrastructure
A fundamental advantage of cloud-based analytics is the flexible and scalable infrastructure. The effective platforms provide auto-scaling capabilities to increase or decrease capacity based on usage and demand. This removes the need to predict required capacity or overprovision resources. The platforms leverage the elasticity and agility of cloud computing to match business analytical needs. This on-demand scalability enables organizations to start small and expand usage as adoption and data volumes grow over time.
Strong Data Integration and Preparation
The amount of data businesses need to manage and analyze continues to proliferate. Effective cloud analytics require robust data integration from various sources, including CRM systems, ERP systems, mobile apps, social media platforms, IoT devices, and more. The solutions need mature connectors, APIs, and integrations to pull data from prevalent enterprise systems and cloud applications. In addition to integrations, the platforms require data preparation and transformation capabilities to handle streaming or at-rest data in diverse structures and formats. This allows organizing, cleansing, enriching, and shaping data for easier analysis and building dashboards, reports, models, and applications.
Collaborative Analytics Environment
Analytics and business insights often need to be shared across teams, functions, and roles. The most effective cloud platforms provide collaborative analytics environments for different users to gain valuable views of data. This includes features like sharing customized dashboards, reports, and charts; annotating visualizations; discussing insights through commentary; and integrating popular workplace tools like Slack, Teams, and email. The collaboration capabilities let managers disseminate analytics across their teams while enabling users to work together to uncover deeper meanings and make better decisions from data.
Governance for Security and Compliance
For analytics on sensitive business data, security and compliance are paramount. Leading cloud platforms apply robust governance policies for usage control, access restrictions, transparent auditing, and data protection. Configurable user permissions, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on integrate with company directories like Active Directory. Additional security controls include encryption of data at rest and in transit, SOC 2 compliance, and ISO certifications. These governance features ensure organizations can use cloud analytics solutions while adhering to industry regulations and internal compliance policies around their data.
Self-Service Analytics Functionality
Effective cloud analytics platforms enable a range of personas, from business executives to data scientists, to leverage analytics at their skill level. The self-service functionality lets novice users generate reports, access predefined dashboards, and create simple charts. More technical users can pull data for ad hoc analysis using intuitive search tools and SQL editors. Data scientists can leverage analytics engines like Python, R, Apache Spark, and popular libraries to build sophisticated models at scale. This spectrum of self-service puts impactful analytics directly in the hands of various business roles.
Augmented Analytics and ML
Another hallmark of leading cloud analytics is increasing reliance on augmented analytics and machine learning (ML) to enhance capabilities. Automated features like natural language query and generation, intelligent visualization recommendations, insight identification, anomaly detection, and forecasting dramatically boost productivity. The machine learning in the platforms can detect patterns, surface key variables that drive outcomes, and identify clusters and segments without requiring data science skills. These augmented capabilities powered by ML algorithms expand the skillsets and effectiveness of entire organizations.
Unified Analytics Experience
Organizations often leverage a disconnected mix of reporting tools, visualizations, spreadsheet models, and business intelligence platforms for analytics. However, the most effective cloud analytics provide a unified experience. Core elements of a unified solution include a single semantic data model, integrated modules for various analytics from reporting to modeling, consistent user interfaces, and interchangeable visualization types. This unified experience lets users seamlessly transition between data discovery, interactive dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and exploratory modeling on the same underlying data. The unified experience also enables reusing analytics assets across use cases and promotes organization-wide alignment.
Embedded and Custom Analytics
While unified interfaces aid adoption, leading cloud platforms also allow embedding analytics directly into business applications and custom solutions using developer tools like REST APIs and software development kits (SDKs). This lets organizations build tailored analytics apps aligned to specific workflows like sales, service, manufacturing, and deliver analytics where employees work. The custom analytics experiences can also be consumed across the enterprise to increase visibility into performance. The flexibility to embed advanced analytics at the point decisions are made boosts insights and drives better outcomes.
IT Management and Administration
Even as cloud analytics solutions reduce workload for IT teams by handling infrastructure and deployment, there remain ongoing management and administration needs. The most effective platforms provide IT teams and administrators tools to govern usage, manage permissions, monitor system health, tune performance, backup data, configure security policies and manage costs. Some also include change management processes like DevOps release procedures. Strong IT tools enable administrators to run cloud analytics efficiently at enterprise scale and compliance requirements.
Partner and Services Ecosystem
While cloud analytics solutions aim for simplicity, many organizations require assistance with adoption across lines of business, engineering custom analytics, and ensuring use cases tie to positive ROI. The top platforms provide access to extensive partner networks and professional service experts to ensure successful usage. Partners build custom applications, connectors, and migration processes to legacy data. Service experts advise on best practices for evangelizing adoption, tailoring analytics to roles, and accelerating time-to-insight across domains from sales operations to financial planning. Augmenting solutions with complementary third-party applications and strategic services fuels usage.
Ongoing Innovation and Improvements
To sustain long-term effectiveness in a rapidly evolving analytics landscape, the most capable platforms persistently innovate and improve through new technologies, upgraded feature sets, and continuous releases. Product roadmaps demonstrating commitment to regular enhancements build confidence for enterprises to invest in the future reliability of a chosen platform. Dedication to R&D for emerging techniques keeps these solutions on the cutting edge over time. Support for graph databases, augmented analytics, predictive modeling, Explainable AI (XAI), and other leading-edge capabilities illustrate robust product advancement in the cloud analytics space.
Conclusion
Analytics and business intelligence remain crucial strategic priorities that depend on scaled and secure cloud solutions. As the cloud analytics ecosystem continues maturing, the differentiating capabilities lie beyond fundamental reporting, visualization, and basic data preparation. The most effective cloud analytics platforms provide a breadth of enterprise-critical components, from governance and augmented analytics to unified experiences and customization. Prioritizing these key solution areas provides the analytical sophistication and completeness for impactful insights that drive better business decisions across today’s data-centric organizations. With data volumes expanding exponentially each year, purpose-built and outcome-oriented cloud analytics will only grow more essential.
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