Having addressed the adaptability and power of an analytics environment in my last two posts, I thought I'd close out this mini-series of blogs by providing the business and technology implications of three attributes that need to define any truly open and unified analytics environment:
- Cohesion
- Business: The platform enables the use of one environment to support the entire analytics lifecycle, regardless of your choice of tools and techniques, thereby ensuring better collaboration and consistency of results.
- Technology: The platform allows for easier support thanks to a common underlying framework of technologies which allows disparate data to be processed within a single environment.
- Agility
- Business: The platform provides the ability to try out different ideas without having to completely swap out to other tools, languages, interfaces, or physical processing environments.
- Technology: The platform allows IT to deploy analytical software capabilities quickly without having to secure new physical hardware resources in advance.
- Governance
- Business: Can hinder business if the required governance prevents them from completing their work in a timely manner.
- Technology: Is an absolute necessity as it allows for management and mitigation of risks from a broad spectrum of security, access, origination, retention, lineage, relevance, and other nuanced characteristics often not seen.
I hope this mini-series of blog posts has helped you see the four main pillars you should look for in an analytics environment: Adaptive, powerful, unified and open. If your platform is built upon these four pillars, you'll be well on your way to success.
If you're ready to learn more, read Steven O'Donoghue's blog post: A journey of SAS high performance to see how all of this applies specifically to the new open platform from SAS called SAS Viya.
