65 per cent of British and Irish firms said they were experiencing high costs for their data analytics, while the cost of training staff to make good use of insights was cited as a key concern by almost three-quarters (73 per cent) of respondents.

With most businesses found to be operating across three private clouds — 42 per cent also said they rely on at least two public cloud providers — the challenging expenditure emerging due to long-term analytics maintenance is said to be due to the following factors:

• requirement of regular cloud snapshots pulled into a common pool (80 per cent);
• use of different analytics platforms on each cloud taking time (70 per cent);
• difficulties with redeploying employees between different platforms (62 per cent);
• long waits to secure insights (60 per cent).

As data-driven decision making continues playing a crucial role in the customer service success of organisations, as well as employee management, there is a need to constantly reassess value driven, and whether platform adjustments need to be made as a result.

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“With businesses across all sectors looking for ways to ensure profitability and drive operational efficiency, the need for timely and accurate insights from data is more important than ever. But after 15 years of rapid cloud growth, organisations are struggling with a sprawl of technology and data, with multiple clouds and analytics platforms creating complexity which is driving inefficiencies and high costs,” said David Shannon, head of hyperautomation at SAS UK & Ireland.

“A solution is moving to a single analytics platform that is cloud agnostic and can securely and efficiently connect to data from different clouds, as well as data stored on premise, to simplify operations and drive efficiency. Furthermore, having a platform with trusted algorithms and high compute speed, will also deliver efficiency and costs savings.

“If the platform also supports a variety of ways of working from no-code to pro-code, it can significantly reduce the costs of redeploying and retraining staff and encourage wider adoption.”

Analytics provider SAS’s report, A Silver Lining from Every Cloud, surveyed over 200 key cloud, data and analytics decision-makers based in the UK & Ireland, on the challenges faced when relying on a mixture of public and private cloud environments, as well as that of analytics platforms.

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