The Big Data and analytics technology market is undergoing significant transformation and expansion. The introduction of a class of platforms and managed toolsets known as Big Data-as-a-Service is a recent development (BDaaS).
How Do You Choose The Best Big Data-as-A-Service Provider?
It’s easy to see the appeal. Instead of building a data centre, developing an analytics toolset stack, and investing in a team of trained data scientists – a costly and time consuming project for any enterprise – why not simply pay-as-you-go?
I predict that the size of this market will grow phenomenally in the near future, driven by the increasing adoption of Big Data analytics across the mid-tier enterprise. Minimising the need for large financial outlays before any results can be seen make them a very attractive proposition for those organisations where a clear business case is a necessity, rather than a luxury.
The market's rapid growth, on the other hand, means that it is now unsettled and shifting. A managed, cloud-hosted Hadoop distribution is currently the industry standard, together with an ecosystem of open source or proprietary analytics, data science services providers and security technology. I believe that in the future, the expanding number of companies that require analytics will result in even more transparent, well-managed service offerings. Despite the fact that all of the services I discuss at the conclusion of this post are based on Hadoop, the extent to which this is highlighted in their marketing materials varies.
Some of the providers are well-known for reasons other than their cloud business services, and their standing as digital behemoths is meant to instil trust in their security and compliance capabilities. Others are solely dedicated to providing BDaaS.
When selecting a BDaaS supplier for your company, you should ask the following questions:
Is there a cheap or no start-up cost?
Many of the companies listed here provide a free trial, so you could see results before spending any money.
Is the solution scalability-friendly? Can you readily and reasonably buy more storage and processing resources as you need them? Big Data projects have a propensity to grow in size beyond the initial vision - can you quickly and affordably buy more storage and processing resources as you need them?
Is it currently in use in my field?
Does your provider have expertise supporting your business cases and clients if you're paying for consultancy and project planning help in addition to data hosting and analytics?
Does it meet the requirements of my company?
BdaaS is especially well-suited to tactics that need the analysis of huge, unstructured datasets. There will also be a requirement to transfer significant volumes of data to a third-party service, which will undoubtedly create security and compliance concerns.
Is it possible to get real-time feedback and analysis?
Today's most fascinating and fulfilling Big Data projects deliver insights based on what is happening right now, not just what happened last week, allowing for immediate action rather than simply learning from the past.
Is it self-service or managed?
Most companies combine the two techniques, with technical employees working behind the scenes to provide services in the most open manner feasible. Your package's level of assistance and consulting, on the other hand, will differ.
Here's a quick rundown of some of the most popular BDaaS services on the market today.
Cloud Dataproc is a service provided by Google.
Since its broad introduction earlier this year, Google's managed Big Data service has seen rapid growth. It has clearly been able to harness their presence and reputation for cloud innovation into a bundle that is appealing to the industry. It uses Google's Cloud Platform to run Hadoop and Spark and interfaces with the BigTable storage and BigQuery analytics frameworks.
Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service provided by Amazon.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the umbrella term for Amazon's cloud-based business tools and services. Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a managed Hadoop service, and it runs on Amazon's S3 storage infrastructure. Customers benefit from their world-class data security architecture, as it is the market leader in offering business cloud computing services.
HDInsight from Microsoft Azure
Because of Microsoft's dominance in the business software sector, it was a foregone conclusion that it would compete for a piece of the BDaaS pie. It has expanded the capabilities and compatibility of its Azure cloud infrastructure by including open source technology such as Spark and Storm. User Interface (UI) characteristics that are instantly familiar to millions of people, even if they have never been near an analytics dashboard before, will be a major bonus for many organisations.
BigInsights on Cloud by IBM
IBM's data management tools are already widely used, so it was only natural that they would want to expand into business cloud computing. It has put together a bundle of services targeted at decreasing the entry barrier to Big Data analytics by integrating advanced analytics technologies. IBM has also formed agreements with social media businesses like Twitter to make it easier to gather insights, and it has developed Watson, a cognitive, natural language processing engine that allows data to be queried and analysed using natural human language.
I hope this has given you a good idea of the present state of the BDaaS market. I'll be keeping a careful eye on developments in this market because it's changing so quickly.
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