Cloud and SaaS have democratized analytics

Operating within a fast-paced enterprise means you need insights at scale and across the entire organization. But you also need accessibility and simplicity when it comes to accessing that data. With a SaaS-based platform, your people can analyze real-time data whenever you need it – without relying on outdated processes and data scientists. This ultimately means you can become a more data-led enterprise that uses key insights to solve problems and make smarter decisions. Here’s how to make it happen.

The decision to move critical data to the cloud is one that most organizations – across all industries – have already taken. Such a unified consensus on the value of the cloud can't be purely down to economics. So why are they choosing the cloud over housing everything in a traditional on-premises server or relational database?

Beyond the cost factor, leaders are seeing real value in the extensibility of the information when centralized in a SaaS platform. Having relevant information that is available to the right people in real-time is critical to informing key business decisions.

Requiring someone to query a database to ask it a question is inefficient and a waste of valuable resources. Even if you use natural language processing (NLP), there’s no reason why you need to force people down the path of having to ask a bunch of questions. Instead, you want to push the right information to the right people.

Constantly improving the speed of your business is essential if you want to thrive in the digital economy. Consider a modern supply-chain business reliant on a relational database. The insights they derive will only ever be as good as the person asking the question. 

This requires data scientists – people who understand the problems and have dug deep into the business to return with insights pulled from hours, days or even weeks of analysis. When they finally do provide a salient point and push it out to a sales leader or supply-chain manager, the insights often lack significant value or, by the time the information gets to the line of business leaders, it’s dated and less relevant.

This legacy process is simply too time-consuming and cumbersome to be useful anymore. Because the data can’t be accessed in real-time, the problem you are trying to solve is constantly changing, which means the ‘solution’ provided is rarely, if ever, adequate.

The growth of cloud and SaaS platforms or solutions has compelled organizations to look at new ways of managing their data. The bottom line is that the most valuable enterprise applications are in the cloud, so that’s where your data needs to be. Not only does this offer an environment where your people can consume information in real-time, but it provides accessibility without you having to worry about security.

And security should be one of your top priorities when it comes to managing sensitive data, especially considering cybersecurity threats are on the rise around the world – global cybercrime costs are expected to top $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

With democratized analytics, you can enable every member of your organization to work with data comfortably – regardless of their technical nous. By providing knowledge workers with cloud-based tools that give them faster self-service access to insights, you not only empower decision-makers through active intelligence, you also free up your data scientists to focus on more high-value tasks. This could be anything from building a template for your digital transformation, to developing better ways to harness key insights.

The bottom line is that analytics is now the price of entry into most marketplaces. So, you need to ensure that every department has greater accessibility when it comes to data analysis. They want – and in many cases need – the right information served up to them at the right time. SaaS solutions have overcome this challenge through ‘alerting’, which notifies an executive or line-of-business leader about problems they need to be paying attention to right now.

The more you can serve up that highly relevant information, the less often your people must wait for a data scientist to retrieve static data – data that is all but useless by the time it arrives.

The democratization of analytics brings with it a wealth of benefits for your organization, your people, and your bottom line. When you give your people the tools to analyze data in real-time, you empower them to deliver key insights – which boosts productivity and decision-making.