Analytics as a Service
AaaS - Analytics as a Service is similar to PaaS, SaaS (Platform, Software) as a service model. AaaS is allowing more and more businesses access to reliable data analytics services.
One of the primary benefits of AaaS is, it allows you to eliminate the cost of having an internal data analytics team. For example: in the not so distant past, businesses that wanted to setup a website and other software services had to purchase in-house servers and hire system administrators to maintain them. But now you can purchase a cloud based server instance for as low as $30/month. This service is known as PaaS.
Data analytics and business intelligence have become a necessity for most businesses small or large to be competitive and maintain efficiency. Having an ongoing set-up of data mining operation in-house requires hiring data engineers, data scientists, business intelligence - dashboard developers, and also make essential purchases such as a data warehousing platform, and a dashboarding platform. This is a significant investment.
Here is a simple AaaS purchase example. Let's say you want to develop a functional and extensive dashboard for your company's monthly sales review. The following diagram elaborates on the steps of the AaaS and the steps of doing it internally.
We understood the obvious benefit of AaaS. There are unspoken benefits of AaaS such as:
- Industry best practices in data analytics products
- Proper user-experience designs - because no one wants a clunky dashboard
- Time to Go-Live is significantly less
- Start small and grow your platform
- Deprecate without losing a ton-of invested resources
Now that we covered the benefits, let's discuss the security concerns of going into AaaS. The main concern that you have is, are we ready to trust our internal data with another company? This is why a privacy first approach matters. I will elaborate on how Datatailor address some of these concerns:
- Your data and analytical models are on a dedicated and isolated server
- You don't share a common database with all of our other clients. A dedicated data lake is developed for your applications
- Encrypted from first day - You have the privilege of communicating through secure encrypted channels from the start
- Still believe data should remain on local servers? No-worries, we support hybrid cloud set-ups with only the analytical models remaining in cloud.
We realized that AaaS has the same concerns that PaaS struggled with in the past. But as of today businesses - even large financial institution have moved to cloud based services by taking the necessary precautions. Whether you're a small business owner or a operations manager who is trying to push more data driven decision making within a large organization, Analtyics as a Service will let you prototype your idea → test and go live in a remarkably short period of time.
This article was an introduction to AaaS and we've only got an eagle-eye view of the whole platform. Stay tuned for more on this topic by following the Datatailor LinkedIn page.
