The Importance of Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing During Economic Crisis

In the wake of the global economic crisis, more and more organizations are looking for ways to enhance their capabilities while reducing expenses and resources, or in other words - how to do more with the same (and even less). In this situation, the importance of Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing technologies in achieving and maintaining the organization's competitive advantage is growing. Whether they are aimed at achieving higher ROI, a better understanding of the competitive environment, or improving products or service quality, Business Intelligence is one of the few technologies that can give an organization the ability to better prepare for tomorrow today. It's no wonder that BI technologies are expected to grow by 7.9% by 2012 (according to Gartner).

Integrating BI and Cloud Computing technologies in an organization provides a new range of data analysis and management capabilities and, as a result, opens new business opportunities. Cloud Computing technology, which allows the use of processing and computing power through the Internet so that users are not required to purchase and manage the systems but only to rent them as a service, is set to cause a significant leap in the use of BI in organizations due to its ability to make the hardware, software, networks, and security needed to create databases available and accessible as required. Indeed, we can see that more and more organizations are already turning to analytical applications for business analysis and insights.

Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing technology are characterized by the ability to aggregate many resources and scale their consumption as required. The emergence of infrastructure as a service suggests that computing power has characteristics like databases and can be available as needed and on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. This allows for separating infrastructure and data from the service, thus leading to cost savings and freeing the organization to deal with the business aspects derived from this service.

Business Intelligence includes sophisticated data reporting and aggregation of factual data from various sources. These contribute to faster and more informed organizational decision-making. These decisions can touch both the organization's core objectives and focused and local aspects. Despite the many developments that have taken place in Business Intelligence technologies, and despite the changes that the business environment has undergone in the last two years, its essence and primary contribution to organizations continue to stand: organizations continue to need to aggregate factual data from many sources. Whether this data is stored for intelligent reporting or undergoes further analysis, the ability to perform Business Intelligence processes is at the heart of data knowledge management and analysis.

The article is based on Georgia Kennedy's article published in Cloud Computing Journal.