How the cloud has made analytics so very accesible

Not so long ago the difficulty in working with data stemmed from the fact it came from different places in different forms, much of it was unstructured or at best semi structured. Getting this data into a shape where it could be analysed and used to provide insights was a tedious process, data cleaning and preparation can be time consuming processes. I have mentioned elsewhere about the "The dirty little secret of big data," being that fact, "that most data analysts spend the vast majority of their time cleaning and integrating data-- not actually analysing it." In the recent past the routines to get inside the data were repetitive and time time consuming, people were doing those very tasks that software was good at. The trouble was the software tools we tended to use did not have high levels of flexibility.