What is Data as a Service?

Every organization today understands the importance of data. But far too few of them are actually capable of leveraging all of the data they have to figure out the best path forward. Today’s leading organizations are increasingly turning to data as a service (DaaS) solutions.

According to the Harvard Business Review , 72 percent of organizations don’t have a data culture, 69 percent of organizations haven’t created a data-driven organization, and 52 percent aren’t competing on data and analytics. In large part, this is due to the fact that organizations have a hard time democratizing data across the enterprise due to data silos, a lack of IT resources needed to create data models, and time constraints, among other things.

With DaaS, organizations are now able to unlock the full value of their data while increasing organizational agility. For these reasons, it comes as no surprise that a recent study from Mordor Intelligence found that the DaaS market is expected to climb to $46.5 billion by 2025, a significant uptick from the $26.23 billion the market brought in during 2019.

Data as a service defined

DaaS is an approach to data management that gives every business user access to all the organization’s data under its control, including structured and unstructured data, via the cloud. Think of it as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, just for your data. 

Instead of having to enlist IT services and wait on their timelines, users can discover data themselves at their own pace while creating ETL data pipelines without having to write any code. 

In turn, this enables your team to create reliable, scalable data pipelines that allow analytics professionals to focus their energy on what you hired them to do: analyze data, not write code.

What are the benefits of data as a service?

There’s a reason more and more organizations are investing in DaaS solutions: They deliver a considerable number of benefits to companies across all industries, which we’ll briefly examine next.

1. Time savings

Typically, to make sense of their data, organizations would have to embark on arduous ETL processes. This labor-intensive approach often led to projects stretching out for months, preventing teams from making decisions with any sense of urgency. Preparing data for analytics required enlisting IT services, waiting for them to have the bandwidth, and hoping for the best.

By making all data readily accessible in the cloud, DaaS rapidly accelerates time to insight—reducing analytics cycles by as much as 98 percent !

2. Analytics made easy

With a robust DaaS solution in place, all of your organization’s data is in one place. This makes it much easier to discover data, run analytics, collaborate on analytics models, and share data with groups that need it when they need it—all without having to write any code. 

In this light, DaaS is essentially a turnkey solution for transforming your organization into a data-driven enterprise.

3. A single source of truth

According to a recent study from KPMG , just 35 percent of executives have a high level of trust with their organization’s data. This is because many organizations struggle with version control, data duplication, and data silos—all of which harm data integrity. 

By leveraging a cloud-based DaaS solution, organizations get the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have a single source of truth for all of their data. This prevents them from working on outdated or invalid data sets, increasing organizational productivity, and efficiency along the way.

4. Increased agility

By making data and analytics easy, organizations also increase their operational agility. Instead of waiting weeks or months for data to be ready for analysis, insights can be uncovered immediately—right when the business user has a question. This enables teams to pivot rapidly as market demands and consumer sentiments shift.

5. Cost savings

Since data is democratized across the organization, IT resources are freed up. And since all data lives in the cloud, organizations can spin up computing resources to accommodate intensive workloads and spin them down once those workloads are completed. Add it all up, and DaaS solutions enable organizations to realize considerable cost savings.

6. Employee engagement

You don’t hire data scientists and analytics professionals so they can sit around twiddling their thumbs and waiting for IT to prep data for them and build data pipelines. You hire them to analyze data and uncover insights that will help your organization figure out the best way forward.

By implementing a DaaS and making analytics easy for everyone on your team, you’re giving them the tools and resources they need to do their best work. As a result, employee engagement increases, which in turn increases productivity and job satisfaction.

Ready to take your insights to the next level?

DaaS solutions have the power to transform your organization. With the right solution in place, all of your employees will be able to discover, access, and explore data quickly—without writing any code, enabling them to get the insights they need in minutes or hours, not days and weeks.

To learn more about how a leading DaaS solution can help your team accelerate time to insights and make better, data-driven decisions in less time, Sign up for your free trial today!