Not Doing Big Data in the Cloud? Better Get There
Forrester Research says competitive advantage will follow big data analytics’ move to the cloud; join in, or get left behind.
Failure to move your big data into the cloud may prove to be “an extinction level event” for companies that are on the verge of becoming digital dinosaurs, says Brian Hopkins, analyst with Forrester Research.
His June 15 report, Move Your Big Data Into The Public Cloud: You Won’t Be Able To Keep Up With Customers If You Don’t, concludes that companies that wish to be competitive in 2020 need to make use of their big data analytics in the public cloud. He was assisted by Srividya Sridharan, John Rymer, Boris Evelson, Dave Bartoletti and Christian Austin.
“The migration of data and analytics to the public cloud that began in 2016 is still going strong in 2017 and will continue in 2018,” said the authors.
The use of big data in the cloud is an example of the force of Moore’s Law. Its usefulness will accelerate there through repeated reductions in compute cost versus gains in analytical systems’ power. Firms that are not leveraging the public cloud for big data analytics will be hard-pressed by 2020 to keep pace, was a key conclusion of the report.
“You must immediately shift your big data investment from on-premises or hybrid toward public cloud,” Hopkins and co-researchers added as a key takeaway.
Want to how big data is part of the bigger picture? See The Need to Go Digital Is Clear; Not Everyone Can Get There.
What’s wrong with on-premises analytics for a company’s big data? The Forrester report said the capital expenditures made will lock the big data users into the systems selected “when they need to be flexible.”
In addition, an internal staff will not be able to keep pace with the unpredictable change requirements that will keep popping up. The staff’s existing skills will determine what changing technologies they dare adopt and even recognized, promising ones “are unlikely to be adopted at scale fast enough,” the Forrester researchers wrote.
