The need for digital transformation in healthcare is predicted to drive the global big data as a service market until 2020, according to Technavio.

“Big data as a service solutions are supporting a wide range of healthcare functions such as disease surveillance, clinical decision support, and population health management,” said Sunil Kumar Singh, one of Technavio’s lead analysts for computing devices research.

“Most of the healthcare data is in the form of hard, and it presents an imminent need for rapid digitalization of data to harness the potential benefits,” said Sunil.

The largest segment of the global big-data-as a service market is healthcare, which was valued at $1.09 billion in 2015. Factors such as data explosion in enterprises and growing demand for cost-effective solutions to meet big data analytics needs contribute to the market growth.

Healthcare as a service (HaaS) is typically deployed through PaaS. It is meant to be used by technical experts and not as an analytical software as a solution (SaaS) solution for direct use by corporates.

According to Technavio, AWS has the largest market share, accounting for more than 85% of the global HaaS market. Amazon Elastic MapReduce is the most popular tool for HaaS. It offers Hadoop-based platform for data analysis with EC2 as the compute system and S3 as the storage system.

HDInsight from Microsoft, Cloudera CDH3, Infoshpere BigInsights from IBM EMC GreenPlum HD, and Windows Azure HDInsight Service are the most popular products in the market. Altiscale is another prominent comparatively new player in market with high potential to compete with the existing companies.

Analytics, which was valued at $840 million in 2015, is the second largest segment of the global big-data-as a service market.

Analytics as a service combines on-demand aspects of cloud computing with the localization of information enabled by big data analytics. Businesses are increasingly integrating these services with their decision-making chain of command to boost productivity and improve customer experience. With intense market competition, the time-to-market strategy has become crucial for companies. Analytics delivered through the cloud has helped enterprises to innovate and make real-time decisions.

The media and entertainment sector is one of the early adopters of analytics with many companies focusing on digital media service. The rise in digital content has resulted in exponential data growth. Therefore, companies have started empowering the data analysis process with more consumer-driven information to boost online revenues.