Fragmentation has been a hallmark of the data analytics domain from the start. The reason being that “BI & Analytics” and “data management” have been disparate silos since the beginning—and still are in many organizations and verticals, as shown by recent surveys.
The effort towards convergence has been a long time coming. Both BI products and data tools have spent years trying to evolve from their purpose-built frameworks towards more robust integrated platforms. Unfortunately, they either have to build additional functionalities from scratch or take the acquisition route—neither of which is an easy task.
In order to meet this growing need, we’ve designed Zoho Analytics to be a unified data analytics platform (UDAP), built organically from the ground up. To prove our point better, let’s take a look at some of the common characteristics of a UDAP and how Zoho Analytics meets each one of them.
Characteristics of a unified data analytics platform
Data connectivity & integration
Connectivity with a variety of data sources—internal and external, structured and multi-structured, cloud and on-premises, files and applications—sets the base for a UDAP. Zoho Analytics connects to 250+ data sources and here’s a sample of our featured data connectors. (Also, read more about data management)
Data preparation
This involves cleansing, formatting, standardizing, and combining data, as well as applying logical formulas to transform and enrich the data. Zoho DataPrep aptly provides all these capabilities for any user who works with data, be it normal business users or data-savvy analysts and engineers.
Analytics tools
Today, business users analyze data and consume insights through data visualizations, like reports and dashboards. While many prefer to access them through a separate tool, others like them embedded in preexisting applications. Zoho Analytics offers powerful visual analysis capabilities with enough scope and support for embedding analytics, too.
AI augmentation
It has become the norm for UDAPs to infuse AI across the complete spectrum of their data and analytics capabilities. Zoho Analytics is constantly enriching its scope for AI augmentation across data preparation and modeling, descriptive and predictive analytics, scenario analysis, and data alerting. Learn more about the topic here.
Administration
This is a broad and very vital area of any UDAP. It encompasses governance, data security & privacy, access control, backend management (including configuration, updates and monitoring) and disaster recovery. Zoho’s seasoned administration practices have ensured that Zoho Analytics functions on top of a strong security and governance framework, which is accredited and certified.
Zoho Analytics(ranked highly as a data analytics software) is currently certified under ISO/IEC 27001 (privacy information management), 27017 (cloud security management) and 27018 (personal data in the cloud). In addition, we are also GDPR, SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant.
Deployment
UDAP providers are mandated to offer both on-premises and cloud deployments, to provide customers enough scope for transitioning between the legacy era and modern data processing at scale.
Zoho Analytics is a cloud-native platform, hosted in our proprietary Zoho Cloud. But we also completely support other deployment options, such as public cloud, private cloud and on-premise. Learn more here.
Challenges faced by unified data analytics platforms
Despite the proven tangible benefits and advantages of UDAPs, notably in terms of eliminating complexity and cost overhead for data analytics operations, some valid apprehension still remains. Here’s how Zoho Analytics addresses them:
Vendor confidence – An age-old fear in the business world is vendor lock-in—and trust between vendors and customers doesn’t happen in a day. At Zoho Analytics, we understand this well and our working relationship with customers/prospects has always been amicable and transparent.
This has earned us the trust of over 13,000+ businesses worldwide. And if you don’t want to take our word on it, why not read what our customers say about us?
Feature lock-in – Two key reasons why customers are sceptical about vendor lock-in are the lack of confidence regarding 1. best-in-class functionality and 2. feature extensibility. While the former takes continuous effort and we have made big strides in that direction over the past decade, Zoho Analytics as a platform offers many avenues for extensibility. They include a robust set of APIs, our own marketplace, and a global partner network to support your custom requirements/implementations.
Scalability – UDAP products are expected to handle almost any data volume and workload. Our Zoho-owned, modern, and scalable platform infrastructure can easily accommodate growing data volumes and usage. It carries a significant edge in terms of achieving best-in-class performance efficiency.
To learn more about what Zoho Analytics offers as a complete unified data analytics platform, here’s a good place to get started. We do provide Personalized Demo (click for registration here), for those who are interested. For further questions, we can be reached at support@zohoanalytics.com.
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