Cloud BI Solutions Are Here to Stay and Here’s Why
It’s up there. All your information. It’s floating around us. Or at least that’s what most of us think when we hear about cloud solutions. Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Cloud services are popping up all over the place. But is it just a fad, a passing phase, like the MiniDisc? Or is it here to stay? And how is it transforming the world of BI?
To get the inside scoop, I chatted with our very own Head of Product and BI guru Dr. Guy Levy-Yurista.
His take on the matter: BI cloud solutions are here to stay, but not as you necessarily expect. Read this insightful interview to understand why.
Q: Can you briefly explain what a cloud solution or cloud computing are?
A: If you open up Wikipedia (trusted to a degree, for sure), you’ll see cloud computing defined as “a type of Internet-based computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand.”
In other words, it’s a way to outsource your IT headaches to someone else, for a fee. This “someone” will handle your entire IT infrastructure at their end, giving you more flexibility; the ability to increase or decrease the number of resources you’re utilizing in a very flexible manner.
Q: How would you say the cloud is impacting the BI space?
A: When there’s a new technology fad, everyone hops on the bandwagon and tries to figure out how to apply it to their field. The cost of missing out on a major cost saving, groundbreaking technological innovation is too much to bear. The same happened with cloud technology in industries across the board.
And at some point, someone said, “Everyone is talking about the cloud. Let’s put BI in the cloud and claim victory.” So companies started offering pure BI solutions in the cloud, where customers’ data would be stored on a big machine somewhere, sitting in a data center — like, for example, AWS or Azure.
This created a multitenancy environment where many customers were running their BI and Analytics (BI&A) implementation on the same application running on the same cloud machine, and all the data flowed to that same machine and application. Pretty quickly, though, people realized that there were several limitations to the so-called “pure cloud,” most noticeable of these limitations have to do with the notion of data gravity.
You see, massive amounts of data are used in BI&A. And the more data there is, the closer you need to be to that data, computation-wise. You need to upload the raw data to the cloud, download the processed data from the cloud, and so on. So there is a massive amount of traffic when it comes to BI cloud solutions, which is also often associated with hidden costs. There are also other hidden costs that have to do with the specific architectural structure of AWS/Azure/cloud-provider-of-choice but I’ll skip those for now (you’re welcome).
But the main point is: If multiple people use the same application on the same machine and all run queries against different data sets at the same time, you end up choking it pretty quickly.What’s the solution?
Cloud is now headed into a hybrid mode, where you have a combination of on-prem data, data-stores and a cloud platform – and you can easily switch between these situations. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions alleviate some IT concerns, but don’t remove IT completely. At the same time, it doesn’t require customers to upload their entire data – which is often very sensitive data – into a cloud environment.
Q: Some say that hybrid cloud is a buzzword which means “we actually don’t offer a cloud solution but we want to say that we do.” What are your thoughts on that?
A: In short, a hybrid cloud is definitely a cloud. But it is a cloud offering with distributed resources; some of them are on-prem on the customer side and others are on the cloud. Think of it as the best of both worlds.
