Charting a Course to the Cloud - Cloud BI That Is!

It’s a no brainer, right? Why would any business go on investing an arm and a leg developing on-premise infrastructure and IT departments when it can access the latest in managed high-powered computing in the cloud for a fraction of the cost?

Warner says larger, well established organizations are often reluctant to adopt cloud solutions simply because they are bound by rigid company policies developed over many years. They still regard the cloud as being at a relatively immature stage of development and few are keen to put themselves at the bleeding edge of new technology – they prefer to see others try it out before they invest.

Warner says most large companies have also invested heavily in IT infrastructure and personnel and members of those well-established IT teams are sometimes unwilling to relinquish the control they would lose with any cloud migration. Other companies are wary about issues such as investing in new licensing agreements in an untested area.

Furthermore, research shows security beyond the company firewall is a key concern of organizations considering cloud. You could be forgiven for starting to wonder how the massive trend towards cloud computing has managed to take flight.

Warner says cost savings and the speed and flexibility of deployment are the reasons often cited by businesses deciding to move to cloud-based solutions. Such advantages are often game-changers for small to medium sized organizations and start-up companies.

In the case of larger organizations it is the flexibility that is often a deciding factor. Access to unlimited scalability in the face of varying or unpredictable data flow can often offset the concerns they might have about a move to the cloud.

Cloud BI has become a huge growth area for Phocas Software. Company Co-Founder and Executive Myles Glashier says it now accounts for almost 30 per cent of Phocas revenue.

And Cloud BI is another area where Phocas excels. The most recent BARC BI Survey, the world’s largest survey of business intelligence software users, ranked Phocas as number one Cloud BI tool, well ahead of its peer companies. The ranking is based on how many sites are using the Phocas product in a cloud environment. In the same survey, Phocas was ranked among the leading ad hoc reporting vendors in Cloud BI.

There will always be a percentage of organizations that will never be comfortable sending their sensitive data skywards. And while it is important to cater for these with well-managed and effective premise based solutions, Glashier says it’s ironic that companies most concerned about cloud security are often the same ones that regularly entrust some of their most sensitive data to far less secure online systems.

Glashier expects the trend towards the cloud to continue as more organizations recognize the true scope of advantages it offers – not only in terms of cost but also in speed and staff collaboration - and those security concerns are overcome.

If you would like to see how well Phocas rates against other business intelligence tools, download the latest results from the world's largest business intelligence survey from BARC Research. by clicking the button below.