Big Data and the Cloud: Providers to Offer More Analytics Tools

Accruing large amounts of data and the need for streamlined examination of that data — in terms of efficiency, analysis/recovery speeds, and accuracy, etc.— are on a collision course. The move from process-centric to data- and memory-centric computing is already having an impact on current computing trends. This change bodes a completely new approach to understanding data sets and will require new capabilities to perform fast, efficient data analysis. It will also require new hardware and software resources. All of this will be enabled by the latest cloud developments and analytical tools that will be augmented further by having cloud access enabling broad application.

The relationship between the cloud and analytics is evolving similar to the way IT is gradually changing its traditional role. For IT, access flexibility, troubleshooting, and controlling costs represented by the cloud are key areas of growth. IT practitioners will require skills in identifying how cloud’s many flavors are solving today's most aggravating problems for designing and adopting solutions for analytics and big data.  Mobile opportunities, device management, security, community-driven architecture, and application development are key resources. These are in addition to IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), SaaS (News - Alert) (Software-as-a-Service), and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions which greatly speed the process of data analytics.

For example, PaaS solutions are enabling organizations to create their own BI/analytics applications to make better business decisions that answer changing customer needs and address competitive business forces. Top cloud vendors at all three layers of cloud solutions are also embedding analytic engines into their solutions and service delivery mechanisms. These include built-in analytics which allow the user to immediately see the key performance indicators (KPIs) they need to do their job on a daily basis. These analytics tools include things like the management dashboard and usage tracking mechanisms to let cloud providers conduct continuous monitoring, measuring and analysis of how users are utilizing their solutions. Finally, there are analytic capabilities that allow the aggregation of the metadata gathered from across the user base. This enables adopters to better utilize the cloud solution, maximize its value and also provide powerful insights to gain competitive advantages.

As this convergence of cloud and data continues, the cloud will not simply be a way to archive data or manage spiky workloads.  It will offer a way to cope with today's explosive growth of data. This new approach to understanding data sets will require new capabilities to perform fast, efficient data analysis as well as require new hardware and software resources and the ability to run and maintain them. As corporate decision-makers become more aware of the power of analytics and seek more insight from their growing reservoirs of data, they will increasingly look to their providers to offer comprehensive data analysis capabilities.