Big Data and the adoption of Cloud have increased over the last few years, but businesses are still struggling to move with the times as effectively as they should.
Survey findings from AtScale revealed findings from a three year research process into how global companies use Big Data and the Cloud. The survey unsurprisingly revealed that Cloud is effectively taking centre stage for Big Data use, but that enterprises are finding challenges with self-service actions.
The survey has found that there has been an increased amount of attention to Big Data deployment in the cloud, with 59% of respondents has deployed big data in the cloud already. Additionally, over three quarters (77%) are projecting they would use the cloud for Bid Data up 5% from last year.
Despite Cloud becoming a primary choice for data deployment, enterprises are still using traditional analytics portfolios which are compromising the effective use of Data. The combined use of data warehousing solutions, data platforms and Big Data services is making IT workers’ tasks more complicated. Therefore, a new approach must be taken.
An area of continued interest is in Hybrid Cloud, which is and will eventually become the norm. The survey found, however, that only a fifth of respondents look at Big Data as a replacement strategy for earlier existing data platforms. Therefore, CDO’s must continue to build alternative data environments that can accommodate both traditional BI platforms with modern data environments such as Cloud. In doing so, deployments and tasks can be carried out more easily.
Businesses must bring together the old with the new.
The diversity of BI and data platforms is inevitably bringing pressure among enterprises to ensure they maintain the best capabilities for self-services, whilst still governing data access. This year, the survey found that self-service capabilities went down the rankings and governance jumped to second spot.
AtScale found that most companies have developed a centralised centre of data functions to optimise their approach, with 55% of respondents using a siloed analytics approach. The research found the industries lagging behind the most are surprisingly the financial and telecommunications industries.
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The survey interestingly found that despite the number of organisations using the Cloud to deploy these data workloads, the cloud has made access much harder. Over half (59%) of respondents deployed Big Data in the cloud in the last year, but it has disrupted their end-users’ ability to access data. This has meant that self-service access has fallen 5% to 42% this year, with 58% of respondents admitting they suffer from a lack of self-service of Big Data.
However 77% of respondents predict that they would use the Cloud for Big Data, whilst over 40% admit to considering a Cloud option that is on-premise. When posed the question of which BI tool of choice was, respondents revealed the top three were Tableau, Microsoft Excel and PowerBI. This has dramatically changed since last year, when PowerBI was ranked in 7th place.
Cloud can help manage Big Data
“Every enterprise needs to understand this report as their leaders will need to consider the impact their evolving Big Data Analytics environment has on their ability to deliver self-service analytics and manage governance. Here at ODPi, we will use the research to continue focusing on building open programs, open source projects and free resources to smooth the path towards enterprise-wide production Big Data,” John Mertic, director for ODPi said.
Confusion around Big Data is a big inhibitor to businesses using it effectively, for example the survey found that over three quarters (78%) of respondents rated their Data maturity at medium or high. However, data from the survey found that only 12% have a high level of maturity. This demonstrates the clouded perspective of Big Data and an area that must be better assessed in order to effectively move forward in Big Data management.
