Cloud: sky’s not the limit

In the beginning, there was data. Then along came “analytics” to try and make sense of, and ascertain insight from, the data. Then in rolled “big data,” a tsunami of data of such grand proportions that most folks crowned it “Big Data,” with capital letters, in a show of respect for its massive size. Big Data, in turn, begot the “data scientist” – the golden child of the Analytics Age and the Internet of Everything. And now, behold, “cloud computing”: Internet-based, networked computing that promises to give Big Data a virtually unlimited roomy place to call home and to give analytics a seemingly ideal environment in which to work.

You might say that the combination of analytics, Big Data and cloud computing is a match made in, well, heaven.

In this month’s cover story, “Analytics in the Cloud: It’s all About the Data,” Dave Hirko, co-founder of B23, takes readers on a quick trip through the cloud and how to implement and make the best use of the technology.

“These days, as the cloud is making storage of enterprise data easier and more affordable for companies of any size, every business is now a data business, whether they know it or not,” Hirko writes.

Dan Fylstra, president of Frontline Systems, also takes a look at cloud analytics, but from a somewhat different perspective in his Executive Edge column, “Cloud analytics: a disruptive technology.” Writes Fylstra: “Growth in cloud-based analytics is happening both because it enables new uses and benefits, and because old objections are fading.”

One of those “old objections” is data security, a topic of widespread concern at a time when hackers are a major global threat. Does cloud computing put data at greater risk than internal data warehousing? Hirko and Fylstra address the question.

The widespread availability of data and the analytical tools to turn it into valuable insight has given rise to the concept of “democratization” of analytics, another trend explored by Hirko and Fylstra. A trio of contributors from Accenture Digital – Srujana H.M., Sanjay S. Sharma and Amitava Dey – dive deeper into the topic in their article, “Democratization of data analytics: New frontier of data economy.” “By freeing themselves from data silos and the traditional practice of data collection, storage and access, agile businesses can not only improve their dynamic decision-making, but they can also expedite enterprise data integration and decentralization,” they write.