BPM Analytics

Is your organization using the power of cloud analytics?

Introduction: Data, data everywhere, making sense of it?

Organisations today are awash in a sea of data. From the era of ‘Big Data’ when we dealt with large datasets and their associated ETL issues, we are now in an era of extracting meaning from massive datasets that are increasing in size by the minute. Some estimates put the amount of data being generated daily at several quintillion bytes and growing.

Analytics are vital to make sense of this ocean of data, and to glean insights that can drive better business decisions. Businesses have discovered that data analysis can give them a competitive edge and help them build intellectual property (IP) that supports advances in their sector. Businesses that are data-driven gain manifold efficiencies in their products and services, which translate to hugely superior business outcomes.

As of today, much of this data is being collected on the cloud, in repositories such as Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints or data servers in vast data farms. Analytics moving to the cloud is a natural progression of this march of data.

The calculating cloud

Cloud analytics is the deployment of massive, scalable cloud computing (hosted services over the internet including data infrastructure, platforms and powerful analytics software) to identify patterns in data and gain insights.

Allied with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), cloud analytics give businesses the edge to mine historical data and make forecasts for future trends and patterns. Riding on these forecasts, the viability of new business models can be explored, besides fine-tuning or pivoting existing ones.

A multitude of benefits

Whether through public, private or hybrid clouds, when cloud analytics is employed smartly, the value of the massive data stored by an organisation is maximised. The benefits of moving your organisation’s analytics function to the cloud are many:

1. Rapid Proofs of Concept (POCs) and experimentation can be done on the cloud, leveraging the power of trained deep learning models and AI applications. These will not require any kind of massive infrastructure deployment as resources on the cloud are scalable and ready for provisioning at will. Such POCs enable organisations to test new products or services before investing major sums in one-premises hosted applications.
2. Business process automation solutions can be done more easily, utilising the cognitive insights derived through cloud analytics. Some level of customer interaction can be done by machines, via natural language processing and the insights derived thereof.
3. The scalability and flexibility of the cloud allows organisations to dynamically provision resources and turn services on and off at will, as business needs change. This dynamic resizing gives product and engineering teams the freedom to experiment without having to worry about budget requirements and approvals.

Perhaps the most important benefit of moving analytics to the cloud is that traditional constraints such as cost, scalability, reliability and performance become non-issues. Multiple vendors offer flexible, open, reliable cloud solutions that are easy to integrate and work with.

Leverage data on the cloud

Organisations of all sizes and engaged in all kinds of activities can benefit from the power of cloud analytics. Sample a few use cases:

1. Understand disease better and invent new vaccines, therapies and treatments, and even cures for age-old diseases and brand-new ones, by analysing massive data sets
2. Identify the best cropping patterns from weather data for different geographies
3. Improve supply chain efficiencies by studying historical inventory data and making correlations with weather patterns, transport data and demand forecasts
4. Improve customer-facing activities and customer experience across a wide swathe of industries by utilising cloud analytics to identify patterns in video, images and speech
5. Unleash data science exploration/deep learning activities, event processing and operational intelligence activities on data on the cloud, aided by smart analytics
6. Streamline e-commerce retailing by studying buyer behaviour patterns, correlating with inventory and building dynamic sales, discounts and offers.

In essence, the data cloud can drive a data-driven business transformation that can give a fillip to existing business models, as well as generate new, profitable business models. Thus cloud analytics makes organization more agile and hyper-productive.*

Future clouds on the horizon

Desirous of leveraging the promise of speed and innovation in business solutions, businesses of all hues and sizes are moving towards cloud analytics. The rapid advances in cloud computing infrastructure are underpinning this global shift. It’s imperative for businesses to evaluate whether the move to cloud analytics will be made with in-house resources or with an experienced partner who can streamline the activity. It’s vital for personnel to be skilled with the requisite skill to manage massive data and intelligent analytics on the cloud in a secure, reliable fashion.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.