Cloud BI (BI Software) is an application that is hosted on a network (typically the Internet) and is used to provide organizations with BI-related information like dashboards, KPIs, and keybusiness metrics. One of the main advantages of a cloud BI solution is that it requires no additional software or hardware upgrades to deploy – users simply have to go to a specified URL and enter login credentials to access BI information.

A recent Business Intelligence Software Comparison highlighted the hold that the major vendors have on this market.

Companies that have deployed business intelligence have first-hand knowledge of the complexities of such a system – the vast network of linked parts and pieces, from data warehouses to ETL applications, OLAP servers to analytical dashboards.  A more repeatable and sustainable model for business intelligence must emerge and Cloud BI has the potential to sustain this.

However the main drawback can be the sheer data quantity that would need to be moved, stored, and processed. There’s a reason we’re all talking about big data these days – according to Francis Prior, research director at Gartner, data capacity in enterprises is growing at 40% to 60% year over year and this requires a significant overhead of performance test tools. We’re not just looking at the past 12 months of data – we want 3+ years for longer-tail analysis, so we’ve got to store that backlog. It’s not unusual for a large organization to have information equaling tens of billions of rows, which doesn’t even account for all of the unstructured data brought in from technical support systems, CRM. Tools such as Power BI can help business intepret and understand the data they have.