Putting business analytics in the Cloud

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ever heard of data scientists? Well the Harvard Business Review named it the sexiest job of the 21st Century and it is has quickly risen to prominence in a number of industries including retail, oil and gas, telecommunications and financial services. So what has this got to do with cloud? Should we all be packing up our RESTful APIs and retraining? Not at all. Before looking at what the cloud has to offer the data scientist and IT departments that work with them, lets have a quick dash through history and give an explanation of the role.

Analysing data with computers has gone through a number of significant changes over the years, from looking at raw numbers by hand, to spreadsheets, Business Intelligence and, more recently, visualisations and complex real-time predictive analytics. One thing that has largely been consistent throughout that period has been the data and analysis taking place on-premise. For a long time this was down to technical reasons, but now that has been overcome with many vendors offering PaaS and SaaS versions of their tools and platforms, which means most of the barrier can be put down to the commercial sensitivity of data and it going outside the firewall. Will the service be reliable, safe from hackers, and adequately protected with encryption etc?…

Extracting deep meaning from your cloud data

In terms of the data scientists themselves, in truth this role has been around for a long time. Essentially it boils down to extracting deep meaning from data. However, the key to doing it is understanding the data itself – not just the results – the raw data, its sources, formats and relationships and then combining this with strategies to analyse the data, from descriptive and prescriptive to predictive perspectives. The data scientist has to have a mind that combines analytic, business and IT skills. Previously representatives from these departments would (read might) have worked to generate the required analysis normally leveraging some kind of data warehouse tool…

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