Tracking The Rise of Data in the Cloud

As we've grown Tableau's cloud analytics business over the last couple of years we've found ourselves in the middle of fast-changing weather. One of the most startling changes is the rise of data in the cloud. 

A few months ago Ivo Salmre and I did an analysis of cloud data based on the anonymous numbers we see in Tableau Online, Tableau's cloud business intelligence solution. (Note we don't ever look at a customer's data, but we do track some usage statistics across the system, i.e. metadata.) At that time we saw that cloud data sources had risen to around 8.7% of all data sources used. That's a small number, but huge when you think about how long cloud data has been around compared to flat files and relational databases. 

I just looked at a neat year of data and found that cloud data grew from 5.9% to 8.7% of all data sources in that period. Of course, this is one subset of the overall market data, based on Tableau Online usage.

Caveats: 

1. The proportion of cloud connectors may be skewed higher in this dataset than in the overall market, since Tableau Online provides live connections to Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery. This is a major factor for some customers who select Tableau Online. 
2. This is a set of metadata about customers using cloud analytics, which indicates they are friendly to the cloud and are probably using cloud data sources more often than then the overall market. 

So which cloud data sources are taking off? Two years ago we saw Google Analytics and Salesforce the most popular data sources. But Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery, large analytical cloud data sources, are growing faster.

We're seeing these cloud data warehouses enable killer new scenarios, from real-time purchase analysis to device analysis and the Internet of Things. I'm not surprised they're taking off.

And by the way, this doesn't include the relational databases that are hosted in the cloud. At this point, we're looking just at cloud-native data sources. 

The world of data is changing fast and getting cloudier. Cloud data sources are almost 9% of all data sources in one cloud analytics platform, Tableau Online, and rising fast. That makes this anonymous, aggregated usage data pretty darn interesting. I'll keep looking at these numbers and publish any findings here.