2. Flexibility
Flexibility refers to the ability to match service capacity to the fluctuating demand from business users and the ability to choose from a wide variety of cloud BI deployment models. Cloud computing is based around the idea that resources are elastic and can be easily scaled up or down depending on a company's needs. When it comes to cloud BI, flexible resources include the data itself as well as the servers needed for the analysis.
With technologies like Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse solution, managing vast amounts of data in the cloud is flexible, scalable and affordable. Users can provision any number of servers on demand and scale BI deployments up or down as needed. And at less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, Redshift is a tenth of the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions. It can easily be deployed as part of a cloud BI solution where some or all of the BI stack is deployed in the cloud. For example, a company may choose to:
o house their data in the cloud with Redshift and also choose a SaaS BI provider (full cloud environment)
o use Redshift for data warehousing and use an on-premise BI solution (hybrid cloud environment)
o keep their data warehouse on-premise but go with a SaaS BI provider (another kind of hybrid cloud environment)
o use Redshift plus BI that's not SaaS but is hosted in the cloud (marrying cloud + a traditional BI license model that's simply deployed on cloud servers rather than in-house servers) …not to mention the choice of cloud servers that are public, private or hybrid. This is what I mean by a wide variety of cloud BI deployment models. The decision to implement cloud BI is not an all-or-nothing approach. Some things, like very sensitive financial data, can be on-premise, while other things, like a dashboard application, can be in the cloud. Whatever a company's requirements are, the flexibility of the cloud means there is an appropriate cloud model somewhere out there that will fit.