3 Reasons to Adopt an Analytics-First Strategy When Migrating to the Cloud
Migrating analytics applications to the cloud is the fastest, most effective, and most economical way CIOs can secure user buy-in and drive adoption of an enterprise cloud strategy. By adopting tools ready-made for a hybrid cloud approach, CIOs can accelerate analytics migration while empowering their organization to embrace a data-driven culture, preserve flexibility, and future-proof their approach to cloud — all while delivering immediate, tangible value to business stakeholders.
Since the onset of COVID-19, organizations have dramatically accelerated migrations away from on-premises solutions in favor of cloud technologies. By some measures, cloud investments grew even faster in 2020 than in 2019, even while accounting for economic contraction during the pandemic, as work-from-anywhere grew and geographic barriers fell.
Even more surprising than the resiliency of cloud investment over the last year is how executives’ rationales for migrating to the cloud and investing in other transformative technologies have shifted.
According to McKinsey, 87% of execs viewed these investments as a strategic imperative in 2020, citing the ability to compete and business transformation as the motivation behind their investments whereas a mere 10% looked to these investments as a cost cutting tactic. Tellingly, organizations with strategic-minded execs also reported twice the revenue growth in 2020.
Citing the competitive edge gained by early adopters, Gartner credits well-executed data and analytics capabilities as “the key accelerant of an organization’s digitization and transformation efforts.” A company’s ability to make faster, more informed, more strategic decisions is fundamental to its ability to survive and thrive in the emerging digital economy.
Migrating your analytics applications to the cloud either before or concurrently with your underlying data accelerates your ability to deliver value to users in the form of modern, data-centric experiences that integrate seamlessly into day-to-day workflows. By focusing on the needs of your business users, you can demonstrate commitment to data usability and preserve the agility and flexibility required to effectively balance user needs with the challenges inherent in an ever-evolving data and technology landscape.
Change will remain a constant — but by becoming analytics-first you’ll be empowered to sustain and expand upon the data-driven culture you’ve worked so hard to engrain in your business. Read on for the top 3 reasons you should migrate your analytics first.
1. It accelerates time-to-value for the business.
Cloud technology investments are increasingly driven by business budgets allocated outside of IT. Demonstrating business value early and often, in the form of modern analytics experiences that improve daily decision-making, not only delivers concrete and tangible results to the business but also works to secure corporate buy-in and funding for other data warehouse migration efforts down the road.
2. It future proofs your data strategy.
Managing a technology roadmap projected to last even 2–3 years requires high levels of agility and room for multiple iterations as the landscape changes and new priorities emerge. Even as data volumes themselves grow exponentially, enterprises continue to establish new pipelines for their warehouses, including data lakes, semi-structured datasets coming from IoT devices and sensors, and AI/ML environments controlled by data scientists.
An agile, hybrid cloud approach to data migration can best be embraced by first deploying an analytics engine that delivers a seamless user experience — even as the data layer continuously evolves.
3. It saves time and expense down the road.
Organizations that move their analytics infrastructure to the cloud reduce expenditures by an average of 30%. Tools that store data in-memory, only accessing and refreshing it when necessary, prevent overruns in cloud costs while improving performance. Further, managed cloud services for analytics immediately relieve customers of ongoing maintenance, upgrades, security management, and more — freeing resources to focus on increasing adoption and driving a data-driven culture.
The bottom line: Don’t wait until your data resides in the cloud to deliver your analytics in the cloud. If you do, you may run out of time to effectively leverage your data to gain and maintain your competitive edge — which, once ceded, may be impossible to recover.
Right now, our experts will seamlessly migrate your entire analytics environment to our fully managed cloud while upgrading you to MicroStrategy 2021 — delivered in weeks with no disruption to your users. Contact us today to get started.
