What is data analysis?

Over the past years, technology made big progress and we are now able to store massive amounts of data. Still, information and knowledge must be extracted from them because of data high dimensionality and complexity. The new breed of analytical data expert, the data scientists, who have the technical skills to solve complex problems and the curiosity to explore what problems need to be solved, have the role to perform the transformations of the data that make sense, in order to deliver knowledge and wisdom. 

Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions and supporting decision-making. Nowadays the source of information could come from any device, sensor, and in any form, but there are still few steps that remain the same:  

The data needs to be collected (digitized) and processed (explored) in order to be able to extract valuable information. INFN Cloud gives you the right tools to analyze your data with a minimum effort to create and access the services, without taking care of the resource’s management or the infrastructure configuration. 

What can you do? 

The basic operations like data cleaning, transforming, and reduction could be accomplished with the popular tools, like Apache Spark. Starting from that, you can plot and analyze the results, exploring the information through ElasticSearch, or by using online editors such as RStudio or Jupyter, and then share your results to disseminate the new found knowledge. The data analyst does not have a unique path; therefore, the INFN Cloud provides several service solutions that match the most common requirements, leaving the end-user the freedom to customize its environment without worrying about the infrastructure management. As you can see from the following screenshot, the INFN Cloud dashboard allows you to choose which type of configuration is better for your needs with a simple user interface.