In its big data and analytics survey report, IDG (International Data Group) identified four major challenges for enterprise big data business development.
1. The shortage of data analysis and management talents
Big data systems are evolving so fast that new tools, capabilities, and frameworks are able to develop and mature in a matter of months, leading to large gaps in emerging big data skills that can easily hinder business growth. Development of data projects. Forty-eight percent of business respondents cited a shortage of talent in data analytics and data management skills as the biggest challenge facing their organization. The demand for big data skills, especially in analytics, is so great that 70% of respondents said they plan to hire people with big data analytics skills in the next 12 to 18 months.
But with cloud services, businesses don't need to invest a lot of time and resources in ongoing setup, maintenance, and upgrades. Cloud services also allow businesses to use the skills they already have, while managed services can perfectly complement the skills they lack.
2. Budget constraints
Forty-seven percent of respondents said budget constraints are the second biggest challenge facing businesses today when implementing big data projects. The cost factor has been the number one concern of most companies for many years. Most big data technologies require massive server clusters, which require long configuration and setup cycles, resulting in significant capital expenditures and maintenance overhead. To complicate matters further, with the ever-increasing volume of diverse data from existing applications or new business needs, the ever-increasing speed of data transfer can lead to unsustainable IT costs. Businesses need to know how to extract as much value as possible from big data while keeping expenses as low as possible. They must be able to scale their infrastructure to manage big data while reducing IT costs. This is exactly what cloud services can help businesses do.
Cloud services eliminate the need for companies to procure and maintain hardware and software infrastructure, and the large capital expenditures associated with them, thereby enabling companies to reallocate limited funds to their core innovations.
3. Unpredictable market
With cloud services, businesses do not need to resize their infrastructure for maximum capacity. Its elastic properties allow businesses to dynamically scale up or down infrastructure as needed.
4. Security and compliance challenges
As businesses collect, store and analyze more and more data information from new and existing sources, data security has become a greater concern. Nearly 35 percent of respondents said they were unsure or did not believe their organization's existing security solutions and products provided adequate data security. Businesses need to decide how to ensure compliance, data management and security requirements without compromising flexibility, agility and performance.
And cloud services are generally more secure than a company's own data center. Since cloud service providers are providing robust computing infrastructure, it is in their best interest to maintain a secure environment. To this end, many cloud providers have accumulated best practices and experience from multiple enterprises and have strict security requirements.
In general, re-architecting existing workloads with cloud services can help businesses reduce costs significantly, where the easiest way to demonstrate return on investment is to lower total cost of ownership. In addition, leveraging cloud services can also accelerate the pace of innovation by reducing the cost of experimentation. Successful experiments will show measurable benefits and, once in place, will spark more demand.