Don't Worry BI, Cloud Will be Your Saviour

Bangalore: Has cloud elevated the role of BI and analytics in an organization?

Cloud- based BI and analytics is still in the infancy stage. A recent survey from Saugatuck Technology reports that by the end of 2011, only about 13% of enterprises worldwide  indicated that they were making use of cloud-based BI/advanced analytics solutions.

However, this will change soon. The survey also revealed that cloud-based BI and analytics will be among the fastest-growing cloud-based business management solution types through the next two years. But over this two year period, Cloud-based BI and analytics will grow annually an 84% compound rate. This conclusion was drawn from the survey sample of 200 user enterprise IT and business leaders, along with input from about 30 vendors.

BI and analytics, both on premise and in cloud have become huge trends in the software sphere. Even when the economy and IT expenditure is cut, companies don’t hold back with BI, because it helps provide data-driven clarity and some predictability in market trends, and therefore usually provides returns on investment.

Although the results of implementing a BI solution are beneficial, in the past BI was difficult to implement and expensive. This is because it was previously based on data warehousing which required a lot of resources. As a consequence, many BI solutions were used just by a few business analysts and executives. The authors of the report led by Brian Dooley from Saugatuck state that cloud will bring change to this scenario.

“Inevitably, cloud is opening up business intelligence and analytics to more users — non-analysts — within organizations” Dooley states. Big Data has drawn more attention to the importance of BI. Many organizations do not have the right tools or enough data scientists to deal with Big Data and will probably rely heavily on cloud providers.  

Dooley and his fellow researchers are of the opinion that the growth of cloud-based BI and analytics will only accelerate. Cloud-based BI solutions have advantages over on-premises BI such as rapid deployment, low upfront cost; quick and cheap scalability for processing, storage, operations and accessibility, but security continues to be a great concern. It is still an area that needs to be explored thoroughly and worked on.

The benefits of a Cloud based implementation are many. Cloud-based BI allows instant propagation of updates and changes, “of particular importance due to changes in data sources, and need to include new types of analysis”. Most importantly, it offers an improved means of sharing data with business partners and the supply chain.