Trends in Big Data and Analytics

This IDC Perspective examines the trends reshaping big data and analytics offered by public clouds in 2026 and assesses how seven providers - AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Tencent Cloud - are responding. It argues that the cloud data platform has become the control plane for enterprise AI, identifies five defining trends (agentic analytics, the open lakehouse, unified governance, multimodal data, and the FinOps discipline), and offers a decision framework for technology buyers."The cloud analytics decision is now an AI-readiness decision," explains Rob Tiffany, research director, Cloud Infrastructure at IDC. "Buyers that standardize on open formats, weight governance as heavily as performance, and prove agents under real guardrails will navigate their next move with confidence."