This document discusses the need for enterprises to establish a cloud-based, agile data foundation for analytics to accelerate insights from big data. It notes that such a foundation can provide seamless data integration, automated data processing, and flexibility to integrate new technologies. It then outlines some key components of an agile data foundation, including data integration, transformation, governance, and tools for ingestion, processing and analytics. Finally, it proposes a stepwise approach for implementing such a solution, including assessment, discovery, implementation, roadmapping, enrichment and optimization.