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Shifting to the cloud helped countless businesses keep the lights on in 2020, as widespread disruption gave them the means and motive to fully embrace Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) across their business. Cloud services are now serving as the foundation for how enterprises adopt products and services, including analytics solutions. For those watching the market, it is clear that Gartner is right that public cloud services will support as much as 90% of data and analytics innovations by 2022. Here are the four trends spurring that demand for cloud-based SaaS analytics.
1. Augmented analytics supports human capital
The need to enable employees to decide and act through a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and analytics is growing. They are among the technologies that are giving businesses a competitive advantage, but their output – valuable and highly actionable insights – would be limited without cloud technology, specifically SaaS solutions.
The pressure for businesses to digitally transform has accelerated during the pandemic, where maturing technologies, such as AI and natural language understanding (NLU), help workers manage incredible volumes of data and tap into insights faster. The traditional methods of conducting infrastructure assessments and regression testing for any new analytics upgrades constrains companies and keeps teams from evolving their analytics adoption at the speed of business. Instead of growing at a pace that allows them to achieve active intelligence from their data, businesses would be held back and ultimately lose any advantage they may have in the marketplace. By using augmented analytics in conjunction with their other SaaS services, they can get the most out of their data and put their innovations to work.
2. Suppliers and stakeholders gain more from collaboration
Most public and private organizations are not set up to share analysis with suppliers, partners, or customers, but shared information often leads to improvements throughout the supply chain, helping organizations get a complete picture of their operational environments. SaaS analytics makes it possible to share data without hurdles and within a governed framework to establish and maintain data security and integrity.
A great example of this is digital supply chain company SDI, which aggregates data in a technology platform to give spend data to all of its buyers, helping them to make more informed decisions. The company also shares through the cloud up-to-date information and visualizations to customers on KPIs and reporting metrics, offering crystal-clear transparency to all of its customers at any moment.
3. SaaS makes analytics scalable and easier to adopt
In an on-premises world, businesses were advised to start small and focus on well-defined projects where analytics could make an immediate impact. Once they saw a decent return on investment (ROI), they could then scale up. While this might have seemed like the best strategy five years ago, the upfront investment was immense, even for a small project. And if that project was successful, the next step involved more time and effort to upgrade infrastructure to support the expanded use cases.
SaaS analytics lowers the technical barrier to entry, as well as the level of investment required for initial projects, allowing organizations to achieve ROI much sooner and expand on demand. Today, the process of moving to an enterprise-grade, SaaS analytics software takes only minutes and the right motivation.
4. SaaS solutions are more secure and reliable
The data that corporations possess is their most valuable possession. If managers have any doubt about the value of their businesses’ data, they should look no further than the measures cybercriminals take to steal it – and the amount of money businesses pay to get it back. Cyberattacks are less effective in a SaaS environment, which lowers the data security risk. SaaS software providers that are trusted for stringent security are certified in SOC II and ISO27001, strict standards that engender confidence that their analytics software can protect their data in a cloud environment.
Saas Delivers What Businesses Need in the Digital Era
The innovations that we can expect from SaaS analytics within the next year will be profound. SaaS analytics is catalyzing digital transformation, supporting fast-paced innovation, and driving the real-time insight that businesses need to make up-to-the-second decisions. Its growing adoption is already telling us everything we need to know about the enterprise appetite for more real-time and scalable, data-driven decision-making.