BI and data management moving rapidly to the cloud
The adoption of cloud-based business intelligence solutions has increased by 50 percent over the past three years, and by the end of this year a majority of organizations are expected to invest in the cloud for BI and data management.
That is the conclusion of a new study on business intelligence and data management trends by The Business Application Research Center (BARC) and Eckerson Group, both independent market analysis companies, entitled “BI and Data Management in the Cloud: Issues and Trends.”
The study polled 370 IT leaders on their strategies around BI and data management, including spending plans for the next 12 months. It revealed that, while the adoption of cloud-based BI and data management products had been hovering at around 30 percent for several years, the rate of adoption has increased dramatically in the past few months.
“Adoption of the cloud BI solutions has grown 50 percent in the past three years, from 29 percent to 43 percent,” according to Carston Bange, managing director at BARC, and Wayne Eckerson, principal consultant at Eckerson Group, authors of the study. “As more applications move to the cloud, companies find it easier to keep their data there as well. Although security is still a concern, many companies recognize that data is safer in a shared public cloud than in a corporate data center.”
The study also finds that organizations are more likely to run BI applications in the cloud than implement data warehouses, data marts and data integration tasks there.
“As a SaaS application, BI is much easier to deploy in the cloud than a data management solution, which requires infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) deployments,” the authors note. “Also, companies must assess security, privacy and political issues when moving data in the cloud.”
IT leaders cite flexibility, cost, and scalability as the top reasons for implementing BI and data management in the cloud, at 40 percent, 39 percent, and 35 percent respectively.
