BI and Data Management in the Cloud: BI Components

More than half of companies run BI tools and servers in the cloud

The rate at which organizations are moving BI into the cloud exceeds that of data management. More than half run BI tools and servers in the cloud whereas between a third and half run data warehouses, data integration or data preparation in the cloud.

Which BI components run in the cloud? TechTarget 2013 (n=278), BARC 2016 (n=173)

It is harder to move data into the cloud due to security and legal concerns as well as the difficulty in loading on-premises data into cloud-based solutions. Still, there is a broad set of different use cases that are run in the cloud starting with data warehouses (42%) but also data marts (31%) and different types of data integration in roughly a third of respondents’ companies: ETL/batch integration, real-time integration and also data preparation (data wrangling) for business users.

Interestingly, the biggest growth in cloud BI adoption in the past three years comes from ad hoc exploration, which rose from 20% to 49%, almost a 150% increase. This is largely due to the growth of exploration (also called data discovery or visual discovery) tools in general and their popularity among power users, who are the most likely of all business users to use the cloud.