BI On premises vs Cloud

The virtualisation of infrastructures in the cloud, favoured by the low hosting costs, raises the issue of outsourcing every company’s reporting solution. Large consumers of resources, especially of storage space, Business Intelligence infrastructures traditionally hosted at internal level are now benefiting from (even more) efficient solutions in SaaS mode. Christine Hug, BI consultant at Pentalog Institute, has investigated this issue and can now offer you some tips:“For several years now, I’ve been working with BI On premises tools: databases hosted and managed at my clients’ premises, client-server or web reporting tools also hosted at internal level. After taking a closer look at IT market practices, I cannot help asking myself the following question:At a time when we are generating more and more data every day that we want to manipulate and analyse faster and faster at the lowest costs possible, wouldn’t now be the perfect time to shift focus?In fields like production and commerce, it is essential to monitor the volume of units produced during a day, the valorisation of stock at a given time, the number of articles sold in the last hour…. Other fields, which are more digital, require the evaluation of the number of visits, clicks, comments… It’s precisely in this direction that Business Intelligence operates and evolves. Not to mention that for increased freedom and autonomy, the focus should shift towards Mobility and Performance oriented tools, without neglecting though the Cost and Security of data access.In the last years, the Cloud has witnessed more and more intuitive, interactive and user friendly tools used for building and following up indicators in a more efficient way: geolocation of indicators on an interactive card, modern and relevant graphic representations automatically adapted to the types of indicators displayed, data mining, such as zooming in information.Cloud solutions are more and more mature, such as Bime, allowing to share dashboards on all types of support (web, mobiles, tablets), while offering collaborators the possibility to communicate in a chat room: I access the graph part I want to know more about and ask for some explanations from my department manager, for instance. He sees my unread note and adds his own comment. Other Cloud solutions like Watson Analytics (IBM) allow for natural language queries and offer both basic and predictive analyses used for anticipating future behaviours drawing on past behaviours.At present, more and more BI cloud solutions offer performant tools, but are they adapted to all types of companies? Most probably not. Whether Cloud is involved, we must first of all analyse the need (in terms of data source types, data volumes, restitution formats, frequency, recipients, etc.) and compare the different offers existing on the market.”If you have a Data treasure (Business Intelligence, Big Data, etc.) project, contact us!