Abstract: In today’s digitally activated world, Analytics is an indispensable tool for most businesses to get insights from past business activity data and use it to drive the planning and decision making for the future. For this reason, in the last decade or so, data analytics has come to be recognized as an integral operation in business execution. As easily accessible Internet connectivity gave rise to the creation of huge amount of data, to the tune of ½ billion GB every day, the presence of specialized Analytics tools became necessary. However, the field of Big Data Analytics is still emerging and a number of nascent tools are available in the market to cater to various needs. This has created a confusing environment, where specific applicability of such tools is sometimes hazy. In this paper, we have attempted to bring in clarity in this field by analyzing some typical workflows of the analytics process, along with a comparison of different types of analytics like Business Analytics, Cloud Analytics and Real Time Analytics.

Keywords: Cloud computing; Big Data, Analytics; Cloud Analytics; Business Analytics; Real-Time Analytics.