How the cloud will change in 2015

With more people going online from many different devices, brands and publishers are in need of data. According to one expert the cloud can be a big help to online brands and publishers to power not only their business but to gather and analyze data. Here is how the cloud will change 2015.

by Kristina Knight

First, we'll see cloud services emerge that will help brands combine data.

"With businesses relying on an increasing number of disparate cloud services, there's an emerging need for value-added services that enable them to leverage all of that data. Self-service BI tools, like DataHero, are focused on enabling analytics on top of multiple cloud services. Rules engines, like IFTTT ("If This Then That") and Zapier are another such category of data aggregation services," said Chris Neumann, Datahero CEO.

Second, self-serve BI's will actually be self-serve.

"For a BI product to truly be considered "self-service" it must have two properties:
(1) any user, regardless of their data analysis background, must be able to use the tool to get answers to business questions
(2) users must be able to access the data that matters to them, without needing to involve IT to connect to a new data source

Put another way, a self-service BI tool must enable any user, regardless of their technical ability, to be able to both put data in and get answers out. Thus far, of the small number of BI tools claiming to be self-service, most only provide the first capability (an easy-to-use interface that enables business users to answer questions), but still require IT to configure and connect the tool to data sources (something that is not scalable as the number of cloud services businesses rely on continues to grow)," said Neumann.

Third, data aggregation will become most important.

"An overarching theme of 2015 will be the need to bring together data from disparate cloud services. Companies today rely on an increasing number of different services to power their businesses, and being able to bring that data together to understand the pulse of the business will become an increasing priority (much as the increasing decentralization caused by data silos in the 90s ultimately drove the consolidation into data warehouses)," said Neumann.

Image via Shutterstock

Tags: advertising, cloud trends, data analysis, DataHero, online data collection