  The advent of the digital age has led to a rise in different types of data
with every passing day. In fact, it is expected that half of the total data
will be on the cloud by 2016. This data is complex and needs to be stored,
processed and analyzed for information that can be used by organizations. Cloud
computing provides an apt platform for big data analytics in view of the
storage and computing requirements of the latter. This makes cloud-based
analytics a viable research field. However, several issues need to be addressed
and risks need to be mitigated before practical applications of this
synergistic model can be popularly used. This paper explores the existing
research, challenges, open issues and future research direction for this field
of study.
