OREANDA-NEWS. January 21, 2016. This is the fourth installment in our blog series about IDC’s recent “FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions-Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation” report (Nov 2015, Doc #259840). Earlier posts discussed the report’s conclusions about cloud disruption and management, cloud-driven IT transformation and the future of IT. Now, we move on to cloud analytics.

IDC Cloud Prediction #5: By 2018, Cloud Becomes a Preferred Delivery Mechanism for Analytics, Increasing Public Information Consumption by 150% and Paving the Way for Thousands of New Industry Applications

Our take: Big data and analytics are hugely important business trends today and a key for many organizations to maintaining competitive position. There’s no question that the cloud has the potential to simplify global access not only to huge amounts of diverse data, but to powerful analytics tools that help integrate, analyze and draw conclusions from all those data sources. Enterprises and consumers alike will come to rely on the cloud more and more as a primary data and analytics vehicle.

The report highlights some compelling case studies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft and the Open Cloud Consortium. The partnerships provide worldwide access to unprecedented volumes of weather, water, ocean and climate data, as well as storage, analytics and data processing tools that third parties can use to build their own apps. These apps will produce not only valuable new insights, but thousands of innovative products and services that help everyone better understand the planet and its environment.

IDC predicts that business will eventually take the lead in capitalizing on this data, creating millions of jobs and significant economic growth.

Cloud Advantages and Next Steps

The cloud can eliminate or reduce the burden on enterprise IT to develop, store, maintain and scale the private infrastructure required to offer safe access to humongous amounts of data. It can also offer the enterprise tools to integrate with other dispersed data sources, including social media and other systems of engagement, and analyze it all. In addition, enterprises can take advantage of global cloud and colocation data centers to store data closer to the source for performance and compliance purposes and bring data closer to mobile workers and dispersed consumers.

The report urges organizations to start building partnerships with cloud providers to deliver data to the public at low or no cost, and to be prepared for a deluge of Internet of Things (IoT) data from sensors and various consumer devices.

IDC is far from alone in predicting the data analytics explosion. A recent market research report, “Cloud Analytics Market by Type (Cloud Bi Tools, Hosted Data Warehouse Solutions, CEP, EIM, EPM, GGR, Analytics Solutions) – Worldwide Forecast and Analysis to 2015 – 2020,” published by MarketsandMarkets, predicts that the global cloud analytics market will increase from \\$7.5 billion in 2015 to \\$23.1 billion in 2020.

Storing and pulling together enterprise, partner and cloud-based data sources for real-time access and analytics will require an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ with secure, high-speed, low-latency interconnections among cloud services, data sources, analytics tools and users. Equinix’s Cloud Exchange offers direct, proximate access to hundreds of major cloud players (AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google among them) and their big data and analytics solutions via a single network port. Colocation in major markets in data centers that host hundreds of cloud providers, such as those run by Equinix, will simplify and enhance connectivity and security, not only among cloud, data and analytics data sources but between these sources and their roaming users.

Learn more about Equinix’s Interconnection Oriented Architecture.