Analytics-as-a-Service: turn your Big Data ambitions into action

Many executives are realising that now is the time to start defining their analytics strategies, and start building the tools that enable their organisations to make sense of the masses of data streaming in.But in South Africa, we still see a pervading sense of inertia – borne from a number of challenges which we have encountered based on our engagement with multiple clients:• Existing legacy IT infrastructures are not designed to handle the workloads of analysing large volumes of increasingly complex data.• Building in-house analytics engines is often a very capital-intensive and time-consuming process.• Data science and related technical skills are in short supply in South Africa, making it difficult to stock the right team, and retain skilled individuals.The answer to these challenges could well lie in the rapidly-evolving sphere of Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS). Using cloud-based tools specifically designed to ingest and analyse large data sets, CIOs and their teams are able to get their data analytics engines up and running at rapid speed. Instead of worrying about building the tools, they’re able to focus all their time on deriving value from the data – transforming the business based on the insights that are generated.With Analytics-as-a-Service, one can scale and customise the tools as the business requires – and build out machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities over time, continually enhancing the process of data analysis.In fact, Analytics-as-a-Service enables us to realise the vision of 'Big Data 2.0': a centralised, consolidated platform, on which applications from every point in the value chain can reside. Each application is able to automatically draw insights from the platform.So, as organisations set out on the road to Big Data 2.