How the Cloud Helps Companies Leverage the Power of Their Data

Modern businesses are awash in data. There’s one problem: They lack ways to use that data to glean insights. Most of it is sitting fallow in data warehouses and not delivering value.

“Today, only about 30% of available data is used for analytics,” says Noel Yuhanna, a vice president and principal analyst with Forrester. “Organizations are eager to leverage more data to improve accuracy and uncover more actionable opportunities.”

Enter cloud-based analytics tools from the likes of Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. These solutions make it easy for organizations to run sophisticated analyses that help them make informed business decisions.

Take the CME Group, for example. As the operator of the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, its clients trade financial products such as futures, options, e-quities and cash. Based in Chicago, the company di-stributes real-time data across a variety of markets, from agriculture and metals to energy and cryptocurrency.

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How the Cloud Speeds Delivery of Analysis

Among its four market exchanges — the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Commodity Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange — the CME Group manages more than 40 years of data and connectivity to more than 1 billion daily market messages.

As part of a partnership with Google Cloud, CME Group uses Google Analytics Hub to host its historical market-depth data across all four of its exchanges and its reference data. The hub provides efficient and secure access to that data for clients.

“Being able to quickly move the preponderance of our data into the Google environment, put the right structure and governance around that data, and allow internal folks to access it more easily has been a huge benefit for CME Group, and has allowed us to deliver new products to clients much more quickly,” says Trey Berre, CME Group’s global head of data services.

CME Group also uses Google Cloud Pub/Sub to ingest fixed future and options market activity across its exchanges and share it with clients.

“We now have twice as many customers consuming our data compared with 2023, and that’s really helping to fuel some client applications,” Berre says. “One example making use of Pub/Sub is Coin Metrics, a leading provider of crypto financial information. They use it to provide their end users with an uninterrupted stream of data that relates to the trading of CME Group cryptocurrency products.”

Through its innovative use of Google Cloud tools, CME Group has been able to tap into a new client base, particularly cloud-native firms in the trading space, Berre says: “We’ve seen quite a number of cloud-native firms engage with us on receiving data for their cloud environments. We probably would not have seen that if they were just seeking to access data from a colocation environment, because it’s just too expensive for them, or even through another provider, because it probably wouldn’t be delivered in the way that is most efficient for them to use it.”

How Data Visualization Supports Industry Transformation

Industrialized Construction Group is striving to accelerate the transformation of the construction industry by applying manufacturing methods to the complex process of constructing buildings.

ICG’s signature product, the Industrialized Construction Maturity Assessment, is an organizational and supplier scorecard that examines traditional and industrialized construction processes, behaviors, skills and systems. It then delivers actionable insights to builders about potential cost and schedule benefits, risk avoidance, and the safety impacts of adopting industrialized approaches to their operations.

Microsoft’s main analytics solution, PowerBI, plays a big role in the value that ICMA delivers.

“With PowerBI, we can visually show our customers how they compare in maturity in relation to others in the industry in very specific aspects of construction project delivery,” explains Sally Mizell, principal and co-founder of ICG. “We can slice data in different ways, allowing us to identify the core competencies that help companies to improve results. With so much investment pouring into construction’s industrial revolution, to be able to pinpoint which new skills and investments will move the needle on a company’s performance is huge for our customers.”

In addition to being able to assess current customer data and information, ICG uses PowerBI on top of ICMA to allow customers to forecast how different improvements might affect their businesses.

RELATED: How to harness your data and contain costs in the public cloud.

“We can do predictive modeling to show customers how their efforts will impact single topic areas, such as their supply chain and inventory management,” Mizell says. “Even better, we can show how one improvement effort can impact multiple metrics, from management to design and delivery, and that’s an even bigger win.”

ICG is gaining value from PowerBI inside its own business management processes as well. The company has been using a beta version of QuickBooks in combination with Office 365 that supports the viewing, analyzing and reporting of company data in PowerBI.

“It ties in all of the tables and creates charts and visuals,” Mizell says. “This allows us, a small company, to see our enterprise data and quickly know if we are meeting targets and goals or not, enabling us to make smarter decisions for our business. It has allowed us to move toward a common data environment.”

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How the Cloud Speeds Time to Insight

GearTrack, a supply chain management company based in Atlanta, uses its own Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to manage clients’ shipments in transit. The company provides data to its clients on a variety of asset conditions, including an item’s specific location and whether it may have been tampered with. Its clients include logistics providers, industrial equipment suppliers and finished goods manufacturers, among others.

“If you have a box of something in transit, you want to detect things like theft events,” explains Josh Horton, GearTrack’s director of data, analytics and artificial intelligence. “If the box opens, that causes a light change, and the sensor device messages our platform. The customer sees an alert for a potential theft and the location.”

When the company decided to redesign its data infrastructure, it opted for Google Cloud Platform because of its seamless integration with the rest of its digital ecosystem.

“We use a ton of GCP services for everything, and they just work so well together,” Horton says. “And we like their open-source foundation because it makes learning these tools a lot easier and quicker, and it keeps us flexible in terms of moving around through different services across platforms.”

An IoT company, GearTrack processes about 2 million sensor messages an hour, which translates into about 8 terabytes of data each day. The ability to process and analyze that scale of data is at the core of GearTrack’s business. To do it, the company built out a data pipeline using numerous GCP tools, including:

• Pub/Sub, a messaging service that allows applications to communicate in real-time
• Dataflow, which translates raw data into a more usable table or column format
• BigQuery, which serves as the analytics database for GearTrack’s data
• Dataform, a post-processing transformation service that combines raw device data with business logic to uncover insights

GearTrack also gains significant value for its internal processes from its GCP-based pipeline, according to Horton. Staff’s ad hoc data analytics requests were very cumbersome prior to the data redesign, often requiring up to a week to turn around. These long time frames are a thing of the past.

“We reduced the time to insight by 88% for internal requests,” says Horton. “That’s really impactful in itself, because reduced requests mean that my engineers can focus more on higher-value projects and delivering product-related improvements. When we do get requests, we’re talking an hour or less of our time, which is a huge return.”