Organizations taking more of their data and analytics to the cloud

The use of cloud computing for analytics continues to accelerate, and that trend is having dramatic impact on both user organizations and the vendor companies that work in this space.

“The growing number of cloud-based solutions, and the interest among organizations to move more and more of their data and analytics to the cloud, are combining to make it possible for organizations to take strategic advantage of the cloud rather than just a tactical approach,” according to Jon Bock, vice president of products and marketing at Snowflake.

But that focus on the cloud also increases the vulnerability of data, and vendor companies have to respond with more secure analytics products.

“We’ve made investments in security because we’re increasingly seeing companies exploring putting sensitive data into cloud platforms,” Boch explains. “We’ve worked on the features and certifications required to meet regulatory and compliance requirements such as SOC 2 and HIPAA.”

Boch attended the recent Strata & Hadoop World conference in San Jose, where he shared his views on the top themes of the show and the top concerns of attendees. Most noticeably, the show has grown to be about much more than Hadoop.

“Strata & Hadoop this year has seen enormous buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) from vendors,” Boch says. “That’s a noticeable shift from the past, where big data platforms around Hadoop and discussions on data science ruled the day.”

“The shift to AI is surprising to those of us who’ve been in the industry for some time,” Boch continues “AI was a widely hyped idea a few decades ago that never seemed to deliver on its promise. What’s emerging now is a more pragmatic view of AI, namely how can analytics be integrated and embedded into processes, decisions, and applications.”

Another theme: “People are shifting focus to outcomes and results, moving past what had previously been technology-driven projects and focus (e.g. how do I deploy Hadoop, how do I integrate noSQL with my overall data environment, etc.),” Boch explains. “People are increasingly being asked to show results, not just projects, and so they are being much more aggressive about evaluating technologies with an eye on time to value.

The Strata & Hadoop show has also evolved to focus on analytics in general.

“Analytics is being embedded everywhere,” Boch noted. “Companies are looking to incorporate live insights from analytics directly into software and services. That’s a marked shift from previous approaches; in which analytics was processed outside the application and then only the results were made available to the application. With that older approach, applications were working with analytics results that were quickly stale. The new approach allows the analytics to be updated constantly for always up-to-date results.”

Boch says he is also encouraged that organizations seem to be rediscovering the importance of data management and governance.