3 Powerful Applications of Using Analytics-as-a-Service
Analytics-as-a-Service is the combination of analytics software and cloud technology. Instead of hosting any analytics software on premises using your own servers, you use a ready-to-go solution that is easy to deploy and most of the time has a pay-as-you-go payment system. It is part of a larger ‘as-a-Service’ solutions such as ‘Software-as-a-Service’ or ‘Platform-as-a-Service’. Thanks to the advancements made by well-known hosting providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, Analytics-as-a-Service has really taken off in the past years and is here to stay.
There are a lot of advantages for organisations if they use an Analytics-as-a-Service solution. Of course, the elimination of manual IT tasks will benefit many organisations, removing the need to hire expensive DevOps and Engineers. But the most benefits for organisations are in the central use and access to all internal, and external, data. This enables business analysts and end-users to have easy access to all the data and to explore the data at hand interactively, and potentially collaboratively.
In order to benefit from an Analytics-as-a-Service, organisations should make all of their internal data available in the cloud. That does include legacy data, which quite often is very important for organisations, but is also hidden away in out-dated data warehouses that are difficult to access.
Many organisations don’t use this legacy data because, due to those out-dated systems and its complexity, it is difficult to process. While at the same time it costs organisations tons of money to maintain the old systems. Getting rid of the legacy systems and importing the legacy data into the Analytics-as-a-Service solution is the first step in truly benefiting from Big Data Analytics.
The next step would be to incorporate your other internal data sets such as your CRM data, your financial data and your sales data. Importing multiple data sources in different formats into, for example, your Hadoop cluster in the cloud, will offer you a complete picture of what is going on and will enable you to make the right decisions. Making your data searchable and easy to combine with each other will offer you significant cost-savings and improve your decision-making.
Cost savings and improved decision-making are not the only benefits of Analytics-as-a-Service. Using Analytics-as-a-Service within your business can drive multiple applications on a business level. Let’s have a look at some examples in different industries:
Many small business owners believe that Big Data is not something they can use because of the required (big) investments and because the need for a lot of data. While both might be true for large multinationals, this is not the case for small companies.
