With the flood of businesses moving to cloud and hybrid cloud to manage the immense amount of data being generated each day, it makes sense that a new term, hybrid cloud analytics, would also take root. In a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment, there’s a whole lot of data in a whole lot of places. And while many cloud vendors offer “analytics” services, their off-the-shelf solutions are usually far too simple to wholly answer any one business’ full list of complex needs. That’s where hybrid cloud analytics come in. They create a seamless, bi-directional path of information throughout all of your data storage locations—cloud or onsite—based on your own unique set of analytics demands. Sound magical? It is. And it’s probably the only way to do analytics right in the new digital landscape.
In the Good Old Days (Like, Last Year)
It used to be that companies were held hostage by a vendor’s analytics offerings. They had to cobble together their own analytics based on what the vendor could provide. The results were limiting. Working between SaaS, public clouds, private clouds, and data centers is time-consuming and overly complicated—or as one writer called it, “dumbed down”—the exact opposite of what analytics should be.
Why It Matters
To truly optimize analytics, information needs to flow in a variety of directions, from apps to clouds to data centers, and back again. For instance, a hospital might store its confidential patient data in an on-site data center, but make a copy of that information available on a patient portal or app via the cloud. In order to know who is using that app, how often, when, or for what, information needs to go back and forth between the various holding spaces, and ultimately to the business end user. When those points don’t link, it creates unnecessary work and confusion.
Enter Hybrid Cloud Analytics
Today, companies like Teradata are recognizing the immediate need for businesses to bridge the gap between their cloud data storage and the analytics held there. The analytics solutions provider is seeking to become “borderless” in the multi-cloud, multi-storage environment, allowing companies to process data faster, while keeping it safer, too. This gives control back to the company, where it belongs. In essence, it allows them to determine exactly what analytics they want to collect rather than choosing what they collect based solely on what their cloud vendor is able to provide.
It might sound like just another buzzword, but hybrid cloud analytics has merit in today’s digital marketplace. Neither big data nor cloud are going anywhere, that’s for certain. Both hold tremendous value in helping companies work more efficiently to address customer needs and improve both user experience and satisfaction levels. But with so much information going to the cloud, in so many different ways, it is even more imperative that companies begin to develop a hybrid cloud analytic strategy if they want to stay at the front of their industry’s pack.
Granted, nowadays there are so many different trends to be “up” on, from IoT to AI to cloud and back again. And obviously, hybrid cloud holds its own list of challenges, not covered in this article. But if you are a business that uses cloud and analytics in any way, it would be wise to get on board with hybrid cloud analytics. As one writer noted, the benefits are clear: better data, happier customers, and a faster-growing business.
Additional Resources on This Topic:
Can Hybrid Cloud be Simply Understood?
Why More Businesses Should be Pursuing Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid Cloud: The Public and Private Cloud Mashup and Its Benefits
photo credit: eljobso Clouds via photopin (license)
This article was first published on Futurum.xyz
Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.