As more companies become data-driven, the adoption of cloud-based analytics is gaining momentum. Businesses are increasingly moving away from traditional on-premises solutions to embrace cloud-native platforms like Google BigQuery, Amazon RedShift, and Snowflake. 

Industry data suggests that the global market for cloud analytics is projected to reach $65.4 billion by 2025. Despite this growth, organizations often face challenges in adopting cloud analytics. The increasing variety of cloud systems and architectures makes it difficult for businesses to choose the right solution for their specific needs. 

This blog post will explore strategies to overcome the complexities of cloud analytics, helping organizations make informed decisions and leverage the full potential of cloud technology. 

Cloud-Based Analytics: 5 Key Challenges

Cloud Analytics requires different architectures, technological capabilities, and techniques than in-house data analytics. The following are the top five difficulties with cloud analytics: 

Spiralling Costs: A 2020 study claims that the waste of cloud resources surpassed $17.6 billion. Most businesses find it difficult to monitor their cloud expenses as more and more of their workloads are moved to the cloud. Furthermore, a lot of cloud service providers with reasonably priced services before raising their prices to include analytics. 

Insufficient Availability: One of the main factors for successful analytics is data accessibility. By lowering the possibility of cloud misconfiguration, proper access management helps to prevent errors that could lead to vulnerabilities. However, cloud data accessibility is also essential for staff members to use the data for insightful analysis and better decision-making.  

Only 48.5% of the biggest businesses, across all industries, use data to spur innovation, according to a study. Furthermore, the adoption of a data-centric culture is limited to 24.5% of firms. To extract value from diverse data sources and realize business benefits, organizations must link cloud analytics to business insights and outcomes. 

Concerns About Security: When transferring data from private centers to the cloud platform, organizations must prioritize cloud security. Despite significant developments in cloud data security, concerns about data security and external threats remain.  

Since data security serves as a key differentiation in a crowded market, data analytics must prioritize it. One of the issues is how easily even distant users can access cloud tools and applications. For effective security, organizations need to establish a solid cloud governance policy that focuses on appropriate data usage. 

Fear of Losing Control: One of the key challenges that clients face is related to fear of losing control. For Organizations that rely heavily on data, data analytics is a crucial and strategic business tool. Technology executives had total control over their data resources before the advent of the cloud. This is no longer true.  

Strict procedures prevent many firms from quickly realizing the promise of their analytics. To solve this problem, IT teams might deploy a cloud-powered sandbox environment (for trial and error) depending on crucial KPIs from business stakeholders. 

Increasing Complexity of Clouds: According to a recent survey, 62% of participants said that one obstacle to cloud transformation is the abundance and increasing complexity of cloud platforms. Similar to this, a hybrid cloud environment consists of a complex combination of cloud development environments, service providers, and private and public clouds.  

The increasing diversity of data and sources is contributing to this complexity. 

It is difficult for businesses to choose the cloud service provider that best fits their needs because so many different cloud providers and architectures are available. They want a unified cloud platform and consistent data to take advantage of cloud analytics and lessen this complexity.  

Essential Actions for an Effective Investment in Cloud Analytics

Starting with cloud analytics involves both organizational and strategic change as well as technological advancements. Business executives and IT managers should, at minimum, take the following actions before their cloud analytics journey: 

Evaluate Present Capabilities: Recognize the existing condition of the data resources, data skills, and infrastructure within your company. This elevation serves as the basis for a roadmap outlining of the cloud services you need and their order of importance. 

Set Clear Objectives: Specify what constitutes a successful conclusion for your endeavor. You can claim better customer insights, faster or more accurate decision-making, and more operational efficiency among other things. Establish measurable and quantifiable objectives. Clear goals will guide your choice of analytics tools and services, concentrating your efforts. 

Develop Your Skills and Talent: Determine any possible skill shortages and plan to fill them. Think about options such as collaborations, hiring, or training initiatives. Make sure the appropriate knowledge is available to make the most of cloud analytics and reduce the possibility of improper adoption.  

Choose the Appropriate Partners: Although cloud solutions may seem identical at first, they differ. Choose suppliers with a proven track record of success. Consider their security protocols and ensure that their services align with your objectives and current infrastructure. 

Pilot Project: begin modestly with pilot initiatives that show immediate benefits and observable value. These pilots generate buy-in across the company for quicker adoption in subsequent stages and examine the potential outcomes of broader deployment. 

Iterate and Expand: Use an agile, iterative methodology to make your strategy more aligned and efficient overall by incorporating fresh insights. Remember that the field of cloud analytics is always changing with new features being added daily, and that the solution you develop may not look like the ones you see now. Repeat and extend.  

Conclusion

While transferring data and apps to the cloud helps enterprises, several security, complexity, and accessibility-related problems must be addressed. In this context, an enterprise’s choice of cloud implementation partner can truly “change the game.”  

Businesses face many opportunities and risks as the digital business grows quickly. Adapting to and making use of the ever-increasing amount of data, as well as the insights it contains, is one of them. Effectively accomplishing this is crucial to the survival and expansion of your organization, not only from an advantage standpoint. 

Even while combining data and getting insights could appear difficult at first, cloud analytics offer a great way to make this process easier. Additionally, cloud analytics offer a way to incorporate data into your corporate structure.

Read Whitepaper Cloud Analytics: Unlocking Business Potential with Smart Transformation