Over the past few decades, business analytics has been widely used in various business sectors and has been effective in increasing enterprise value. With the advancement of science and technology in the Big Data era, business analytics techniques have been changing and evolving rapidly. Therefore, this paper reviews the latest techniques and applications of business analytics based on the existing literature. Meanwhile, many problems and challenges are inevitable in the progress of business analytics. Therefore, this review also presents the current challenges faced by business analytics and open research directions that need further consideration. All the research papers were obtained from the Web of Science and Google Scholar databases and were filtered with several selection rules. This paper will help to provide important insights for researchers in the field of business analytics, as it presents the latest techniques, various applications and several directions for future research.