BI in the cloud: push and pull factors

 

Harnessing the cloud benefits of flexibility and accessibility and integrating it with business analytics enables BI functions to be readily accessed at anytime and anywhere. This keeps data constantly and instantaneously updated without replication, thus increasing the efficiency of BI functions. Businesses work only with what they need, leaving backend processes to service providers, while they focus on business growth. This is especially important for SMBs who do not have big enterprise budgets to hire CIOs to manage IT and storage systems, much less analysts to monitor business analytics.

 

However, just as with BI on-premise, businesses deploying BI in the cloud will still need to manage their own administrative chores, such as categorizing, organizing and programming business intelligence functions to enable the smooth running of big analytics on the cloud. Security may also weigh heavily on the minds of companies, especially when it comes to valuable data analysis. In moving BI functions to the cloud, companies have to make sure that the BI cloud service provider is able to provide a secure environment. The chosen cloud service provider should also be able to minimize potential security breaches through technologies such as secure multi-tenancy.

 

Data explosion is set to accelerate in the years ahead and business leaders are looking towards solutions that can efficiently and effectively mine the intelligence that are sitting within the organizations’ firewalls. With Big Data pushing analytics to their limits, moving BI into the cloud can fundamentally transform predictive analysis.