Security

What Is Cloud Analytics and How Does It Work

Cloud Analytics

Cloud analytics is essential for any business that uses or produces data sets. Cloud analytics refers to data collection, tracking, and analysis that takes place on cloud-based systems, instead of on-premises systems. These cloud-based analytics tools enable companies to manage large data sets and improve their business results.

Cloud analytics can be used in many ways. Cloud analytics can be used to analyze website traffic, production efficiency in a factory, financial market data, and climate trends based on satellite data. It also allows you to understand what sensors are seeing. This article will provide key information that every business owner or decision-maker needs to know about cloud analytics.

What is Cloud Analytics?

Cloud analytics is the process of analyzing and manipulating data in the cloud, rather than locally in a business system. Cloud-based analytics systems allow users to access, aggregate, and analyze data. These platforms allow users to work with large data sets and identify trends, as well as pinpoint areas of improvement within the company.

Your laptop’s spreadsheet program, or on-premises analytics, may suffice for a small number of data points. However, complex data sets with tens to thousands of inputs will not be able to be analyzed using this program. Cloud analytics allows companies to process large data sets faster and more cost-effectively than building infrastructure. This is just one reason to use the power of cloud analytics for data analysis needs.

Cloud Types

Although we might think of the cloud as something intangible, it is actually a term that refers to large computer networks located in one or more data centers. One of the following types of cloud models may be suitable for your analytics platform, depending on your security, access and performance requirements, and other considerations.

Public Cloud

A public cloud is an internet platform that third-party providers offer over the public internet. It makes them available to everyone who wishes to use them or buy them. It makes resources available to remote users via a standard cloud computing model. This includes virtual machines, storage, and applications. Websites, shopping apps, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), applications that manage email, calendars, project administration, and even bank accounts are some of the most popular public cloud resources.

Private Cloud

Private clouds are private computing system that is only available within your network. Private clouds cannot be shared with other organizations. These clouds work in the same way as your company’s intranet. You can only access them when you are at work or connected to a virtual private network. When the IT infrastructure is only available to one customer, all clouds can be made private. Private clouds offer increased infrastructure capacity to store large amounts of data, on-demand services, and greater visibility into the resources.

These resources offer additional security but may require more to set up and maintain networks and applications than services offered by a public cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud refers to a combination of a private cloud and one or more public clouds. Each service can be connected using proprietary software. A hybrid cloud strategy connects multiple computers over a network to consolidate IT resources, move work between environments, and integrate a single management tool.

Also read: What is the Difference Between Private Cloud vs Public Cloud vs Hybrid Cloud?

What is Cloud Analytics Tools?

Cloud analytics tools come in many forms. Many of these tools can be accessed via your web browser. These are just a few examples of the most popular cloud analytics tools:

  • Website Analytics: The most popular type of cloud analytics is website analytics. These cloud analytics tools allow you to understand the website traffic, conversion rate, bounce rates, and other information so that you can make adjustments to improve user experience and increase revenue.
  • Sales Analytics: Sales analytics platforms allow you to manage customers, leads, and sales across different geographies. They also help you monitor the performance of sales teams. These data can help leaders identify important trends and signals that will aid in developing more effective sales strategies.
  • Financial Analytics: These financial analytics go beyond financial reports to identify revenue and expense trends, and provide details that are difficult to find without a large group of financial analysts.
  • Performance Analytics: Performance analytics analyze sales, production, and other data to identify bottlenecks, expenses, and improvement opportunities.

You may also find software with more advanced features and specific tools among any of these types of tools. While basic tools can summarize and help you understand data; advanced tools use technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze large amounts of data and make predictions.

The Key Takeaways

Cloud analytics gives you more power to analyze large data sets than programs running on your local server or computer.

Cloud analytics software can be accessed by anyone within your company with the correct credentials. It is also protected with strong security protocols.

Cloud analytics tools that use AI algorithms to help you identify trends and opportunities from large data sets.

Cloud Analytics Explained

Cloud analytics software transforms large data sets and other data sources into useful summaries, insights, and visualizations that can be used to inform business decisions.

Some cloud analytics software only focuses on one type of data such as website usage or social media interactions. Some cloud analytics software is more general and can work with many data sets, regardless of their disparity, to give a complete picture of your business’s operations.

Cloud computing allows your team to access powerful computing resources at remote data centers. This makes it possible for you to tackle larger tasks that would have required a supercomputer a while back. Employees and others can access the data via their smartphone, tablet, or computer once it has been imported.

Cloud Analytics: How Does It Work

Data centers are physically located with servers that can store and compute information, as well as connect via the network with other centers. Remote data centers often require large amounts of infrastructure and equipment in order to process all the data sent to them. Although many companies have the financial resources to create and manage their own data centers, it is too costly for most. Cloud computing is the solution.

Cloud analytics allows companies to access remote data centers to process large amounts of data. This can help your team achieve new productivity levels and produce better and more accurate results. Cloud analytics is a win-win solution for businesses as it makes data processing cost-effective and easily accessible.

Cloud analytics has many advantages over other solutions. These include increased sharing and collaboration as well as lower costs, greater security, and scalability. Analytics can provide companies with insight into the performance of marketing, operations, finances, and other departments, which will allow for better decision-making.

Also read: Top 10 Cloud Computing Tools

Cloud Analytics: How can Businesses Use it?

Cloud analytics can be used in infinite ways, just as there are many ways to run a business. A digital music streaming service would need different cloud analytics requirements than a retailer.

Cloud analytics has a primary goal to improve profitability. However, businesses may have other goals such as increasing sales or generating more profits from existing customers. Reports and visualization tools are able to reveal areas where a company is underperforming or overperforming in order to create larger strategies. Cloud analytics can be used by both small and large businesses to analyze troves upon troves of business and customer data and find key insights.

For example, companies that depend on large sales teams could use cloud analytics for a better understanding of how one region performs. Analytics can be used to identify areas where you are dominant. You may also succeed in doubling down on regions where your competitors are having trouble securing deals. Social media influencers might identify trends in the content that gets the most likes. A genetics scientist could use cloud analytics to sequence millions of nucleotides in a genome. These are just some of the many possible uses of cloud analytics.

Why Use Cloud Analytics?

Cloud analytics offers major advantages over traditional methods such as spreadsheets or other on-premises or desktop-based solutions. Cloud analytics is a clear choice because of its many benefits.

Advantages of Cloud Analytics

These are seven benefits of cloud analytics that every business owner and manager should consider when selecting an analytics solution.

  • Scalability and Growth: Cloud platforms provide powerful capabilities on-demand, with almost limitless flexibility. These resources can be used to scale up or down, You don’t need to buy, set up, or maintain servers or other resources. Your needs will change with growth.
  • Unified Approach From Anywhere: Workers may need to be trained in multiple systems when your sales, IT, marketing, and finance teams each manage their own databases and use different analysis tools. They are forced to spend time searching for data in disparate systems and need to be trained on different solutions. Your entire team can access cloud analytics from the ERP system to get single-source information and analytics no matter where they are located.
  • Break Down Silos: Collaboration between departments is easier when everyone uses the same system. Although users have access to only the information they require, it allows teams to communicate more effectively across departments and gain more valuable insights.
  • Cost Reduction: The costs of Housing and maintaining on-premises systems include IT headcount, hardware, and development costs. Cloud analytics is a single bill with lower total costs in many cases.
  • Get Faster Answers: Cloud computing allows faster data processing than on-premises systems and employee laptops.
  • Increased sharing and collaboration: The cloud is intrinsically better for sharing. Workers can now work with the same data set and share reports using just a few clicks instead of multiple files and email attachments.
  • Better Security: With Most Cloud Analytics, data is frequently backed up to multiple servers so that it can be protected in the event of a fire or other natural disaster. Because no data is stored locally, it is impossible to steal and sensitive data cannot be shared via insecure methods such as email or flash drives. Password-protected data allows users to only access the information they require. Audit logs allow visibility into who accessed it, when, and what they did with them.

Features of Cloud Analytics Tools

These are the most important features to look for when shopping for a cloud-based analytics platform:

  • Data Sources: Link to one or more data sources with automatic refreshing for the most current results.
  • Data models: Search for data models that match your company’s data set, such as sales orders and customers.
  • Processing Apps: Use your data to discover new insights, novel uses, and patterns.
  • Data sharing: Share information among team members to improve productivity and efficiency throughout the company.
  • Data Storage: Consider the storage limitations of vendors and think about what your company will require in the future.
  • Analytics Models: You can either tap into prebuilt models that are designed for specific use cases or create your own.

Reporting Create detailed, accurate reports that you can confidently present to the C-suite or board of directors, lenders, or investors.

Written by
Aiden Nathan

Aiden Nathan is vice growth manager of The Tech Trend. He is passionate about the applying cutting edge technology to operate the built environment more sustainably.

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