Clouds are Making it Sunny for Business Intelligence

To say that business intelligence is moving toward the cloud would not only be outdated but also be it would also be an understatement.  Some industries have adopted it faster than others, but most will certainly follow suit. There is some fear in regards to the security of going on the cloud but the benefits outweigh the risks in practical use cases.

There seems to be a lot written about the risks of being in the cloud and much less written about the benefits. I was adamant in learning more about the benefits and my research led me to an article written by Kiriti Mukherjee, Director of information Management at Collaborative, called “Business Intelligence is Getting Cloudy.” In this article, Kiriti Mukherjee talks about the benefits of being in the cloud and presents four use cases. I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing the article below and I hope you find it as beneficial as I did.

7 Benefits of Being in the Cloud:

1) Cloud BI reduces fixed IT costs by shifting capital expenses to operational expenses where they pay only for the computing resources they use.

2) Cloud BI improves productivity by easily and economically scaling usage of business intelligence (BI) applications up by provisioning (or decommissioning) computing resources as needed.

3) Cloud BI is also attractive for business users because it can be faster and less costly to build a prototype and deploy a new BI application using a cloud service provider than relying on the internal IT.

4) Cloud BI can help companies grow because they can now use the money saved from cloud-sourcing to invest in other innovations.

5) Cloud BI makes your data more accessible across a large organization. Information can be accessed via mobile devices, allowing for immediate access to important data in the field or at client meetings.

6) Third Party Service Provider: Having an outside organization handle your server can ease the pain of routine maintenance, as well as oversee installation and testing.

7) Using the cloud BI is more environmentally friendly than owning your own servers, and is more energy efficient.

4 Cloud BI Use Cases:

1) Supplementing in-house BI – most companies have BI reporting applications tied to their in house applications such as financial reporting or ERP. Business users need advanced analytics quickly to make decisions are often looking to implement complementary BI solutions to successfully deliver on their BI objectives.

2) Expanding SMB – SMBs often grow quickly through acquisitions, sometimes in very diverse geographies. They need fully functional, sophisticated analytic capabilities that can easily scale without huge capital costs.

3) Seasonal Business – Renting the additional computing and disk space on a cloud BI platform only during peak periods provide these businesses a smarter alternative for their analytic needs.

4) Big Data in the Cloud – Many organizations are getting more interested in conducting prototypes for big data analysis and there is no better place than the cloud to build these POCs.

Click here to read the entire article.