Cloud Business Intelligence – How can the two technologies help your business grow?

Businesses of all sizes need to stay updated with the latest technology to thrive and succeed in their industry. Understanding the competitive landscape, companies now want to optimize their business processes and make strategic decisions that add value to the company and help the business grow and scale to new heights. Cloud business intelligence solutions help them in achieving exactly that.

While at the initial stage, enterprises used business intelligence (BI) tools. However, today it has become an integral part of businesses of all sizes that are now embracing the benefits of cloud BI architecture.

What is Cloud Business Intelligence?

As the name suggests, it is the interesting integration of two different technological concepts –  cloud computing and business intelligence. In other words, cloud business intelligence is the deployment of BI tools on a cloud server enabling anytime/anywhere access.

In cloud BI architecture, cloud computing serves as a vault for a large amount of data, such as dashboards, KPIs, and other types of business analytics. It also serves as a platform for various business intelligence applications where businesses can easily gather data from a wide range of resources in one place that can be accessed anytime and anywhere. Another benefit of cloud computing is that it offers scalability and flexibility.

Numerous types of cloud-based BI solutions are being embraced by businesses now since these advanced technologies positively contribute to business growth. For example, Customer Relation Management (CRM), online file collaboration and storage, and helpdesk software.

With no limitation to data access, integrated with advanced business intelligence tools, cloud-based business intelligence facilitates the required information in the required formats that are critical for making business decisions.

Understanding the Different Types of Cloud BI Tools

There are multiple cloud business intelligence tools available in various forms, each with its own set of features and functionalities. Some of them are listed below:

Cloud-Based Dashboards

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other business metrics can be represented visually with the help of cloud-based reporting and dashboarding tools. Users have the option to delve deeper into the data to obtain more information and make wiser decisions.

For instance, our development experts at Appinventiv worked with the world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA, who were facing the challenge of gathering customer data for marketing objectives. The brand was also having trouble onboarding new customers because it was becoming tough to allocate a sales representative to each customer due to the high volume of business.

For IKEA, Appinventiv developed a cloud-based ERP platform that not only provided customers with real-time product availability information but also gathered customer data for later use for their marketing initiatives. 

Our work resulted in the development of a cloud-based solution that is currently being used at over 7 additional IKEA stores. The brand also promotes the solution as one of the most important tools for calculating ROI.

Data Visualization

By utilizing cutting-edge data visualization techniques like charts, graphs, and maps, these tools assist users in discovering and analyzing data. Users can alter data and produce their own visualizations to uncover new insights.

Self-Service Analytics

With these solutions, non-technical users can design reports and dashboards. Users can acquire data from many sources, edit it, and produce visualizations tailored to their individual requirements.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics technology analyzes historical data and forecasts future trends and outcomes using machine learning algorithms and other statistical models. The users can utilize these forecasts to make well-informed choices on resource allocation, risk management, and other business-related issues.

Embedded Analytics

Embedded analytics tools are embedded inside other applications, such as CRMs or accounting software, and provide real-time analysis and reporting within those apps. This eliminates the need to transition between various tools or platforms in order for consumers to make data-driven decisions.

Key Advantages of Cloud Business Intelligence

Statistics clearly show that the global cloud-based business intelligence software market revenue is estimated to reach a valuation of $25.73bn by 2023 which indicates that the potential of cloud business intelligence is huge and is being rapidly adopted by businesses.

Let’s peek into some of the key advantages of the same.

Affordability

With the integration of two technologies, the best of both worlds come under one roof, benefiting each other, thus making it affordable. With the rapid implementation of cloud computing in business analytics, companies do not have to bother investing in expensive hardware and software, and maintenance costs. Also, you pay for what you use, guaranteeing better functionality at a fair price.

Better Scalability

Business intelligence logic is based on data analytics from various sources. The ease of sourcing this data is made possible by integrating it with cloud business intelligence tools. It provides the flexibility of accessing additional data and processing resources with ease. Based on the required data handling and analysis, scaling in and scaling out the number of users can be seamless without having to wait for additional hardware or software installation needs. 

Bonus Read- Why Business Intelligence Matters in Organization?

Ease of Integration

With cloud business intelligence solutions, integration with other databases and programs enables smooth data flow. The more advanced BI solutions exploit the data from social media platforms to perform “sentiment analysis” on a real-time basis. Remote data sharing can be done smoothly, irrespective of geographical location.

Reliability

Cloud computing offers reliable and secure data backup and storage and is an excellent choice for disaster recovery enabling business continuity. 

Only secure systems are reliable. However, it is a myth around the world that cloud services are not as secure. With the implementation of varied security protocols and features, cloud business intelligence solutions offer highly secure services. The most advanced security protocols, such as using fingerprint and voice recognition authentication, are used to ensure data security.

[Also Read:  How to approach data loss prevention (DLP): Identifying the best practices]

How Do Different Industries Use Cloud BI?

Cloud BI can be beneficial for every industry as data is being used as the lubricant to ensure smooth operations of business machinery. Having said that, education, entertainment, healthcare, and finance have adopted the tool more quickly than others. 

Cloud business intelligence software is extensively used by organizations for smooth data flow and analytics across departments. This helps in the quick vertical growth of the organization based on real-time data availability and analysis.

Some of the companies that have successfully implemented Cloud BI technology have been reaping its benefits in multiple folds. Mentioned below are some of the examples:

American Express

Having a global presence, the company has been effectively tapping the benefits of the hybrid cloud with the ease of infrastructure functionality that serves 100 million card members. On the other hand, business intelligence has been a critical component of any financial organization. With cloud-based business intelligence software, American Express is able to develop and deliver new payment service products to its global customers.

Netflix

With the integration of various business intelligence tools, Netflix is now getting more and more engagement on its content. With the remarkable service, its recommendation system drives over 80% of the streamed content. Netflix uses cloud-based BI for offering personalized video content recommendations for millions of its users worldwide.

Starbucks

With the advent of cloud business intelligence software, this US-based high street coffee shop chain has formulated strategies to maintain its competitive edge. With the help of customer data across geographies, the company predicts the purchase pattern of the customers and sends individual offers based on customer preferences. This has helped in drawing customers to the store, thereby increasing sales.

Cloud Business Intelligence Software Capabilities to Look for

Now that we have understood the key advantages of cloud-based business intelligence software, let’s look for the capabilities it must have that will help you choose the right structure for your modern cloud BI architecture.

Built-in Data Management Capability

The basics of business intelligence lie in crucial data integration. Your cloud BI tool must have the capability of extracting data from multiple sources, transforming it into a required usable format for analysis, and cleansing the data for high quality.

Advanced Analytics Capability

Capability to perform and facilitate data mining and predictive analytics for effective root cause analysis and accurate forecasting.

Cloud Reporting and Visualization Capabilities

Must have the ability to generate reports in a presentable and simple format that can be translated into meaningful data to obtain detailed analytical insight.

Collaborative Capabilities

Your cloud business intelligence solutions must have the capability of sharing analytics and reports with ease on a real-time basis. Sharing relevant insight across departments will help the business to move forward with a unified goal.

Deployment Models of Cloud Business Intelligence

With a clear understanding of the advantages and must-have capabilities of cloud-based business intelligence, now is the time to understand various deployment models. Generally, there are three cloud types.

Public Cloud

The word public implies that the cloud infrastructure is shared by multiple tenants. The cost thus gets divided, making it the most affordable option for cloud BI. It is a great option for small and mid-sized businesses with limited budgets or companies that deal with big data workloads.

Private Cloud

Companies that are concerned about regulatory compliance or data security should opt for the private cloud model. As it provides dedicated storage and computation resources only for your company’s use, it comes with a cost. This is the most expensive option to deploy the cloud BI solution.

Hybrid Cloud

If your company can segregate between the data that require the highest security levels and the one that doesn’t, opting for the hybrid cloud deployment is the most cost-effective option. The computing environment combines the traits of both public and private clouds for your cloud BI solution.

Why choose Appinventiv for your cloud BI needs?

With effective strategies and excellence in execution, we at Appinventiv, help organizations with smooth digital transformation. By offering our best services, technology expertise, and execution models, we aim to achieve your intended business outcomes.

Collaborating with our cloud professionals, we deliver the best-in-class cloud consulting services on the cloud storage service platform of your choice.

With our business intelligence consulting services, you can ensure the success of your business in leaps and bounds by discussing your requirements with our seasoned experts.

FAQs

Q. What is cloud intelligence?

A. The term “cloud intelligence” describes the process of analyzing and extracting insights from massive volumes of data using cloud computing technology and methods. This entails using cloud-based platforms’ elasticity, scalability, and processing capacity to perform sophisticated analytics jobs on enormous amounts of data and to draw out useful patterns, trends, and insights.

Cloud intelligence uses cutting-edge machine learning methods like neural networks and deep learning models to create predictions and spot trends in massive datasets. Applications for this method include supply chain optimization, fraud detection, customer behavior analysis, and predictive maintenance.

Q. How does cloud BI work?

A. Business intelligence is the core that helps in analyzing data and transforming it into meaningful deductions. Data on the cloud in a clean, high-quality format is used for business analysis and forecasting. By integrating the two technologies, cloud BI offers flexibility, scalability, and affordability at the same time.

Q. What are the challenges of cloud BI?

A. The main challenge that cloud computing has been dealing with is security and reliability, as the companies do not want their data crossing borders and falling under foreign jurisdiction. Here is a list of other challenges:

Siloed Systems: The effectiveness of BI depends on having comprehensive data, yet BI tools struggle to access data that is compartmentalized and has different permission levels and security settings. Teams working on BI and data management must get rid of data silos and synchronize data from several departments.

Unmanageable Data: The data generated by modern technology can be vast and haphazard. A plethora of information can be found in databases made up of photographs, videos, and enormous amounts of unstructured text; however, because the data in these databases lacks structure, it may be difficult to extract usable information from them.

Q. Which software applications are exploiting the cloud BI functionalities?

A. Customer analytics being on the top of the ladder, supply chain analytics, marketing analytics, and pricing analytics are the key players in the global cloud-based business intelligence market.

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director