The cloud has provided numerous benefits to many organizations, including scalability, cost savings and flexibility. Because of this, adoption of cloud services continues to grow rapidly. According to IDC, 56% of companies already utilize multiple cloud services. Unfortunately, many of them have no overarching plan, instead getting to where they are in the cloud through ad hoc commitments made by various business units. That can lead to problems, not the least of which is that data in cloud services often become siloed and unavailable to analytic tools that form the foundation of a digital business.

IT often has little visibility into all those contracts. This makes building a complete corporate data directory nearly impossible, and complicates the effort to combine information from different services or applications into a cohesive whole. As they build their analytic dashboards and reports, these organizations find that every analytics task requires tremendous amounts of manual intervention to find, evaluate and integrate data that is siloed in a cloud service and not integrated with important on-premises data. If the organization’s data scientist or database analyst (DBA) resources are limited, those resources can be overwhelmed.