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Two major trends within the business world seem to be made for each other. The cloud has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade, to the point where it would be a rare sight to see any company that doesn’t utilize the cloud in at least some way.

Big data analytics has gained a foothold in many industries as businesses collect and analyze large sets of data to discover fascinating new insights in ways of improving their companies and finding new ways to succeed.

With all the services that cloud computing as to offer, it only makes sense that big data analytics would be one to keep an eye on.

Data analytics in the cloud has been around for years, but only recently has it been steadily gaining ground. Not only are more businesses using it than ever before, it may be the perfect ingredient to spur cloud adoption to even greater heights. Cloud-housed data analytics may indeed be the cloud’s “killer application.”

Cloud Analytics on the Rise

A recent survey from IDG Research as published by Informatica seems to bear this out. At the moment, only a small percentage (15 percent) of business decision makers are actually using a cloud analytics solution.

That’s a small amount at least compared to other cloud services, but all signs point to significant growth happening in the near future. The same survey found that 68 percent of responders are expecting to analyze, investigate, or plan on deploying a cloud analytics solution within the next year.

Even more plan on adopting a hybrid or cloud-only analytics approach within the next three years. It’s clear from these numbers that businesses recognize the advantage of taking their big data to the cloud. As a result, cloud analytics will likely explode over the next year or so.

Impact of Big Data

It’s the rise of big data that has left many companies struggling as they deal with so much information at their fingertips. To properly perform big data analytics and gain the insights they’re looking for, businesses need to have a lot of processing power and storage capacity. After all, they don’t call it big data just because it sounds fancy.

The cloud allows companies to finally harness those attributes, providing the necessary storage and processing power needed to analyze large sets of data. Cloud services can also provide special data analytics tools in order to find even more insights from the big data companies collect. This is especially important as it opens up analytics to smaller businesses that may not have the budget or resources to perform analytics on their own.

As more companies turn to the cloud to handle their big data analytics needs, more cloud services are popping up offering the feature. Some have been around since the beginning while others are only just starting to offer data analytics in the cloud.

Businesses have a lot of vendors to choose from, Tableau Online, Qubole, IBM’s Watson Analytics, Google BigQuery and Google Analytics, Microsoft’s Power BI, and many more. Considering the advantages offered by cloud analytics, it should come as no surprise why so many businesses are looking at adopting the many solutions offered.

Cloud Applications

The benefits of using cloud analytics are many, as are the various ways it can be utilized. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, for example, is one of the main driving forces behind cloud data analytics adoption. The positives of taking the cloud analytics approach include having a more agile business, increasing the overall pace of innovation, and creating more efficiency no matter the size of the company.

Also worth noting is data analytics performed in the cloud is simply easier when taking into account all of the data now originating in the cloud. Digital marketing, social networking, and mobile applications can produce and use a lot of data, and since that all comes from the cloud in the first place, performing analytics in the cloud makes the most sense.

Many businesses will still have a number of obstacles to overcome in order to use cloud-housed data analytics. For many, a corporate mindset may instinctively push back against new innovative tools.

And even though security in the cloud has improved over the past few years, many organizations are concerned about placing their data in the hands of a third party. Once these fears are faced and defeated, companies will feel much more confident about using cloud analytics. We may not be too far away from having an all-pervasive cloud, affecting nearly every transaction businesses make.

This article was originally published on www.business.com and can be viewed in full here

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