Panorama Business Intelligence

…And the battle rages on. Cloud or on-premise business intelligence? Cloud is the hot new strategy, has a lower overhead and leverages out-of-the-box functionality for quick implementation on new data warehouses, applications and departments and for new users. However, a lot of companies want to keep BI activities on-premise because of the costs and time associated with moving high volumes of data—like entire data warehouses or data-marts—to the cloud in order to realize the advantages of SaaS deployment. This polar dynamic has kept companies in the dark on one simple fact: combining the two platforms offers you the rich benefits of both worlds.

You can build a hybrid solution ad-hoc, leverage one of the few early adopters of hybrid BI, or call on your ISV to adopt a more dynamic strategy—but, however it’s done, it’ll be crucial that your business leverages a combination cloud and on-premise business intelligence in the coming years.

How does it work?

Most organizations are fine with running applications on the cloud. For security and other reasons, these same companies want to maintain full control and ownership of their data on-premise. With a hybrid solution, information stays on-premise while the application layer that collects the data resides in the cloud. This kind of functionality allows for full, secure control of data, coupled with the cost-saving benefits of cloud computing.

The data access layer is the one key difference between pure and hybrid solutions. The component that directly connects to the data stays on-premise, and the only data transferred to the cloud is the result of the query.

Now, you have a hybrid solution. No more software maintenance. No more uninstalls, upgrades or patches. All the maintenance is performed directly by the vendor, and your IT staff is free to perform more pressing tasks. Meanwhile, all of your data is warehoused on-premise where it’s safe and directly accessible.

ISVs are lax to adopt the strategy because it can be expensive to add cloud functionality to an on-premise product and vice versa. In the long run, it’ll be beneficial for ISVs to adopt a hybrid BI strategy to beef up their value propositions and sell more services. Well, it’s the new year. Let’s hope some of those vendors made the right resolutions!