Understanding the use case

Learn about the self-service exploratory analytics pattern.

In modern data-driven businesses, Line of Business (LoB) Data Analysts are often tasked with exploring and analyzing new data sets and providing business insights on the fly, without waiting for the curated and prepared data or depending on the central IT.

Today, it is hard for LoB Data Analysts, and the Data Engineers that support them, to respond in a timely manner to LoB’s needs to update existing dashboards and reports for new insights or to create new reports to respond to an emergent need. Often, these requests need integration of various data and application silos that require high levels of support from central IT services to make resources available, to set up ingest and curation processes to bring usable data to the report or dashboard consumer or to safely import and process the data available outside the current infrastructure (flat files on a user computer). This process is time-consuming, expensive, and often quite rigid. As a result, many LoB decisions are delayed, costing businesses opportunities, revenue, and customers.

With Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW), LoB Data Analysts and Business Analysts can explore data sets stored in Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Data Lakes, cloud object stores such as Amazon S3, or uploaded data sets from their computers and analyze them in new or existing BI visualizations on a self-service basis without direct support from central IT resources, as shown in the following diagram:

CDW enables you to go from data to dashboard in 15 minutes.