Three Benefits of Cloud-Based Business Intelligence Solutions

According to a 2012 survey, business intelligence technologies are among the fastest- growing cloud-based business management tools around. In late 2011, only about 13% of enterprises worldwide had cloud-based BI solutions in place and in use. In 2012, cloud-based BI saw an 84% compound annual growth rate.

The three benefits of cloud-based business intelligence solutions, according to the survey’s author are:

1. Cloud makes business intelligence affordable.

Enterprises benefit from the fact that there is no hardware and ongoing maintenance costs. The implementation of the solution is more rapid, it needs a smaller budget, and upgrades are the provider’s responsibility.

2. Cloud enables specific business needs integration.

Enterprises benefit by having a more scalable solution that can faster integrate new functionalities to fit business needs or faster adapt to business development. Cloud increases employee productivity and reduces redundancy.

Enterprises using cloud-based Business Intelligence solutions benefit by having more efficient processes as different business departments or external partners can access the same data, eliminating duplication. Field service management providers have defined this need with service teams in particular, since they work with other vendors, departments, and providers, and perform work at many different locations within a region.

3. Cloud increases BI tools results.

By storing data in a single location that can be accessed by the entire enterprise, the chances of having duplicate data or different versions of almost the same information are eliminated. This helps companies reduce data volume and complexity and leads to valuable data insights for departments across the entire organization.

As data continues to increase in all industries and businesses begin to rely more and more on high quality data insights, information accessibility whenever, wherever can provide a critical competitive advantage. If you consider choosing and implementing Business Intelligence technologies in your enterprise, you should research on the advantages a cloud-based solution could bring to your day-by-day activity.

Cloud does provide better, faster and cheaper business intelligence solutions and mainly the cost-factor and quality-factor, I find important.

The more data-driven organizations and their decision-making process becomes, the more important data-quality is.

Security

Security remains a great concern for organizations of cloud-based solutions, we’ll see a figure passing by reading further.

SMB Sector

As elaborated in this article, the cloud for SMB is becoming mainstream. According to a market study by BIScorecard and Intelligent Business Strategies, Cloud BI is considered important-to-critical in 46% of companies surveyed and SMBs are leading in the adoption of public cloud BI.

Cloud BI can no longer be considered merely hype or niche and while Cloud BI is important, there are a number of inhibitors to widespread usage, with data security (24%) as the biggest inhibitor to BI in the public cloud. In addition, 22% of organisations also cited the uncertain value of cloud BI as a key reason inhibiting adoption.

For those companies who have deployed, public cloud BI is particularly important to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Large enterprises over $1 billion are implementing hybrid computing environments consisting of a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and physical on premises BI systems.

SMBs are leading the adoption of public cloud BI and upload on-premise transactional and analytical data to the cloud on a daily and near real-time basis. The study also indicates that the average number of users for public cloud BI is fewer than 50.

Adoption of private cloud computing inside the enterprise is being driven by the benefits of scalability and reduced total cost of ownership as organisations seek more value for money on their existing IT infrastructure. Large enterprises implementing private cloud BI are moving BI tool platforms to a virtual server environment to accommodate more users as they open up BI to both desktop and mobile devices.

Skepticism

Scepticism exists around the benefits of deploying relational and analytic databases on private clouds. Virtualising DBMS software may be considered for smaller databases (e.g. data marts); however, larger databases deployed on data warehouse appliances are unlikely to be migrated unless scalability and performance can be proven. Even fewer organisations are virtualising data integration.