Today, the world of business intelligence is changing incredibly fast as cloud systems gain popularity. When compared to more traditional business intelligence applications, cloud applications have shown vastly improved capabilities for significantly lower costs. With cloud solutions, you gain improvements to the security, integration speed, efficiency, and support capabilities of your BI applications.
Business Intelligence tools have many advantages when it comes to the presentation of results. This is in the form of charts and reports, slideshows, and more. However, traditional business intelligence applications have one severe limitation – you can’t do anything to act on the results received. This is where a cloud-native approach comes in to save the day. A collaboration feature is built into the system so that when the analysis of results has concluded using the classic BI approach, you can act upon the analyzed information quickly and efficiently via a centralized cloud-based system. For example, you could create a task and assign it to an employee in a different department, regardless of where in the system they are. The notifications for such assignments can be sent to the relevant recipients immediately and in real-time.
In typical BI applications, the method used to get data requires access to the database. Once access is gained, the data must be pulled from it to an external system. From there, the data is transformed into processed information and then pushed back into the original database. This process takes time and is prone to errors. It involves opening ports to push data back into the database, which is a huge security risk. However, with cloud-native technology, you get to authorize exactly what data leaves the database over your intranet without exposing it to the internet, posing less security risk.
When you integrate BI into your company’s systems using traditional methods, the investment required is very large. Maintenance will also cost quite a bit of money because physical servers are installed to support the applications. Another disadvantage is that because you invest so much money in the on-premises system, you will probably be stuck with the same vendor for a long time after you have decided to move on.
With cloud-native solutions, you eliminate all of this, as the cloud is a subscription-based service. You no longer have to invest a large chunk of your available capital to integrate the system into your company. This results in lower costs, no vendor lockdown, and easy upgrades in the future.
Many potential Business Intelligence software vendors say that they have a cloud-based solution. This doesn’t mean the same thing as cloud-native technology. Cloud-based systems involve access using a web application. With cloud-native systems, the entire back-end process is rendered useless, which takes away a lot of the time and effort needed to set a business intelligence solution up. Cloud-native means no hardware, or software, will be installed in your own premises.
Today, many businesses realize the advantages of cloud-native BI integration. Why aren’t they incorporating this system at a faster rate? The main cause is the vendors of the business intelligence solutions. The vendors have convinced the businesses using their traditional solutions that the cost of migration would far outweigh the benefits of switching to the cloud. Another cause of slow progress is that companies are too proud to admit that they have made a mistake by using traditional solutions instead of a cloud-native one. They need to show investors that they put their money on the right thing, which means that most large companies will stick to their traditional systems until the very end.
Keep your business secure and up to date with cloud-native technologies and BI. Increase employee productivity by giving them tools that allow cooperation and collaboration with colleagues in different departments. Best of all, with cloud-native solutions you save money. Traditional solutions are a thing of the past, move your business into the future with cloud-native technology and BI.