Tomorrow I'm listening in to a presentation by an entrepreneur about "enterprise analytics on cloud computing". Did that make your head spin? It certainly made mine spin, so I took the afternoon out to learn as much as I could absorb.
So what's in a cloud? Trusty old Wikipedia and google came to my inner geek's rescue. Here's what I've learned in a short afternoon:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provide interaction.
Simplified: IT needs to cut costs while fulfilling ever increasing needs for data storage and processing. 10 years ago, 50 MB of email space was plenty. Today, you wouldn't last a week with that. My last company gave us only 70 MB to live on back in 2007 - yes, cost neutral was always on their minds. Cloud computing lets IT achieve its goals.
What about enterprise analytics? Thanks to this post it was understandable: http://smartdatacollective.com/brett-stupakevich/33341/abcs-enterprise-analytics
Enterprise analytics can refer to any or all of these three concepts:
1. Access to analytics capability (so users throughout the enterprise can perform their own local analytics)
2. Access to enterprise-level analytics (so some users can see reports or dashboards that incorporate data from the whole enterprise)
3. Analytics platforms that can function at an enterprise level (working with multiple data sources and formats)
There's a lot more that I digested, but I'll make this a short post since it's my first one and I'm still experimeting. Anyway, tomorrow should be a crash course in flying blind. Let's see how my basic understanding works!
More to come in the next post tomorrow, on what's buzzing in the cloud!