What is SAS Viya and should you invest in it?

Here at Selerity, the administration, installation and maintenance of SAS Viya are among our core offerings. But what is SAS Viya? What are its features? But most importantly, can you yield the benefits we have discussed in one of our previous blogs? In this blog post, I aim to shed some light on one of our core offerings and why you need it – if you wish to make full use of an analytics environment.

What is SAS Viya?

SAS Viya is a data analytics framework to help organisations speed up their data analysing capabilities. The aim of SAS Viya is to make big data analysis more accessible to organisations and to speed up the process at every step from data collection to data deployment. I have worked with several companies across different industries and all of them have benefitted from SAS Viya due to an accelerated timetable and scalable operations.

What are the core components of SAS Viya?

SAS Viya has many key features that make it such a valuable asset for organisations. However, in my experience, the difference makers come down to two features.

In-memory processing

I have talked about in-memory processing in one of my previous blogs and how it speeds up data processing. Essentially, analytics software shifts the processing function from ROM to the RAM, improving the rate of processing at a significant rate. SAS Viya takes this core technology and places it in an open environment.

With SAS Viya, computer operations are distributed across multiple cores in a single server. All data and tables are stored in a memory for as long as it is required. The SAS Viya engine offers a secure, scalable multi-user environment, which allows for collaboration between multiple people for concurrent users.

Flexible structure

Having met several company representatives over the years, there is one tech feature that is becoming more and more important: Scalability. The desire to scale up or scale down the scope of operations without needing a significant investment is what organisations are looking for from their data analytics infrastructure.

Fortunately, SAS Viya supplants this need thanks to its secure, cloud-based infrastructure. Data processing automatically adjusts to both constrained and unconstrained environments allowing organisations to scale computing as needed and even experiment with different approaches, and even different scenarios. The flexible structure and open environment allow professionals from different professionals to collaborate on data collecting and processing.

What are the benefits of SAS Viya?

SAS Viya is invaluable because it comes with several benefits not found elsewhere beyond rapid data processing.

Foundation for other products

SAS has produced many analytics software products for different functions in different industries. SAS Detection and Investigation for Banking, SAS Visualisation and SAS Data Preparation are just some of the products available for users. However, to make significant use of any of these products, you need to be using SAS Viya, for it serves as the foundation for other SAS products. Foundational support is found in the form of a visual and coding user interface that makes analytics software more accessible.

Furthermore, the cloud-based infrastructure paves the way for additional gains by streamlining costs. It has been my experience that those who invest in SAS Viya first before moving onto other SAS products make bigger gains than without Viya.

Easier managing the platforms

Organisations have an easier time managing the platform because the infrastructure is designed in such a way that those individuals with the right knowledge can design and develop shortcuts. SAS Viya includes public REST APIs. These API’s allow developers to add the analytics framework to applications.

Data scientists can monitor assets within a common environment, solve synchronisation issues coming from different code bases and monitor production models, thus data consultants spend less time solving issues and more time making new discoveries. These features make SAS Viya more accessible and easier to use.

Investing in SAS Viya

Organisations who invested in SAS Viya saw significant improvements in data management, processing and turnaround time. These improvements came about because the analytics framework comes with several useful features, including in-memory processing, cloud-based infrastructure.

The features found in SAS Viya makes for an easier time managing other SAS platforms. In my experience, SAS Viya has brought several improvements to an organisation’s bottom line, provided it was installed, administered and maintained by a professional team who know the product (and environment) inside and out.

Access SAS Viya with the Selerity analytics desktop to speed up and optimise your big data analytics capabilities for improved insights. Get in touch with our support team today for more details.