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Business Intelligence Servers versus Cloud

Written by Ralph Gleason

On Premises versus Cloud

We have been seeing lots of blog posts, and articles on the question of "BI on Premises or in the Cloud"? I personally remember the days when it was a simple choice, with the exception of one solution everyone using DSS / BI were using the systems in a Client - Server architecture. Almost every product was limited to installing servers and installing a BI Client on their users desktops. Then along came the push to make it all available through any browser.

This meant the server now needed to have a webserver implemented and didn't rely on proprietary application servers, rather a Tomcat or any other web application server would do. This of course meant that you had to deploy your BI solution as a full fledged web application, with security and all the rules imposed by good web deployment practices to make sure the appropriate user had access to the appropriate level of information no matter which browser they happen to be using.

Eventually this evolved into the discussion here and now; "do we host or do we use cloud?" is the question of the day in 2017.

as I said, lots of resources are out there, but our question is "Why not a blended solution"? We are able to deliver an application which uses the latest in API utilization to minimize the need to make the decision at all.

even so, here is a nice write-up for those who might want another perspective: Data Pipeline Blog