Why now is the right time for midsize businesses to migrate analytics to the cloud

Across industries, small and midsize business and enterprises (SMB/SME) are seeing great benefits from embracing digital transformation. Cloud and migrating from simple BI analytics to advanced analytics are some of the top technologies they use to achieve their customer or operational goals.

Research conducted by IDG indicates that nine out of ten companies will have some part of their applications or infrastructure in the cloud by 2019 with much of this increase driven by SMB/SMEs.

Value 

Depending on SMB/SMEs' age and size, legacy infrastructure may require regular upgrades and technical expertise to operate efficiently. In-house costs of analytics also keep growing.

Migrating analytics to a cloud-based platform augments core business systems like finance, HR, supply chain, and marketing. Organisations’ near-term benefits include:

- Cut on-premise costs by around a third by moving infrastructure services to a pay-per-use model
- Increased agility and innovation with the ability to scale your analytics capabilities as required
- Leverage AI and ML without the distraction of having to provision technology.

SAS, the leader in analytics, worked with BBP, a fast-growing company that turns energy savings into profitability through advanced analytics in the cloud, showing a clear example of innovation benefits. The journey with SAS started with a results-as-a-service (RaaS) project, with the goal of delivering analytical models and business results. The high-performance cloud environment enabled quick and flexible deployment and value to be realised within three months after data collection.

Options

The number of cloud services and solutions (RaaS, SaaS, Paas, IaaS) continues to rise, as do migration options: 

- Results as a Service, used by the aforementioned BBP and benefits of which are covered by CIO magazine.
- Subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) will grow at an 18% CAGR by 2020 (Bain & Company).
- Investment in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will grow from 32% in 2016 to 56% in 2019, making it the fastest-growing sector of cloud platforms (KPMG).
- The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is predicted to reach $72.4 billion worldwide by 2020 (Gartner).

This executive summary provides key questions to ask as you build a business case and prepare your plan to migrate analytics to the cloud. 

AI Enablement

The modern IT leaders know that the cloud is a key enabler of Advanced Analytics and AI.

With open source integration and the SAS analytics platform that balances choice and control on the cloud, SMBs and SMEs can orchestrate their entire analytics journey – from data to discovery and deployment.

There has never been a better time for midsize organizations to adopt and migrate advanced analytics to the cloud. Working with a trusted vendor, or partner, to determine how to start and put a strategy with clear ROI in place is the key next step.  

Looking to learn more? Check out the whitepaper Refactoring Analytics for the Cloud to discover exactly how organisations are moving analytics to the cloud.