5 reasons to consider a cloud-based BI strategy

There’s a scene in the Rocky reboot, Creed, where Sylvester Stallone hands his protege, Donnie, a slip of paper with a training regimen. The kid takes a picture and hands it back to his bewildered mentor.

“Aren’t you going to take this?” he asks. Without skipping a beat, Donnie replies, “No, it’s already up in the cloud!” Cut to Rocky looking to the sky, baffled.

Though Rocky isn’t up to speed on cloud-computing, it’s hardly a new development. According to new findings from Forrester research, we are in the midst of a seismic shift to the cloud. Why? There are significant benefits of leveraging a cloud-based BI solution, particularly in the areas of time to value, flexibility, and delivering innovation.

Thinking of moving your business analytics to the cloud? Here are 5 reasons the cloud makes sense for your business. 

1. Time to value.

ROI for analytics and business intelligence solutions is increasing and currently delivering an average $13.01 for every dollar spent, according to recent analysis by Nucleus Research. What enterprise organization wouldn’t want to demonstrate that ROI for the business and gain competitive advantage and more quickly? SaaS solutions can provide this speed. BI implementations that used to take months in the traditional model can be compressed to weeks, days, and hours, and are being automated via self-service tools for the everyday business user. And, as the icing on the cake, SaaS providers are generally willing to offer free trials and painless proof of concepts to allow for discovery to prove the tangible benefits.

2. Higher adoption rates.

Nobody wants to be the one responsible for purchasing a high-cost on-premise or off-the-shelf software that doesn’t end up actually getting used by the business. Just like the apps you use on your iPhone, SaaS apps tend to have lower learning curves and higher adoption rates. This allows you to gain insights anytime, from anywhere. Are your users primarily business users or technical analysts? The more intuitive and approachable the BI technology is, the more likely your usage is to soar, providing more opportunities to deliver insights to the business.

3. Reliability.

SaaS providers typically manage all aspects of infrastructure, scalability, redundancy, and provisioning of the platform, and provide clients with near-real-time data-refresh capability. By scaling resources up and down based on customer size and usage, IT teams can focus on their core business without getting bogged down thinking about infrastructure or uptime. Finally, organizations leveraging a SaaS solution can rest assured that they will always have access to the latest version of the software through ongoing technology upgrades and enhancements (often more frequently and incrementally than on-premises solutions).

4. Security.

The perception that computing in the cloud is less secure than the enterprise data center is reversing. In fact, a recent report found that nearly two-thirds of IT security professionals think cloud software security equals what they can provide in their own on-premise data centers. “Employee error” turns out to be the most common reason for a data breach at companies. While it might seem counterintuitive to move your sensitive data farther away from your company, the fact is that cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, and others have invested heavily in monitoring systems, firewalls, encryption, and security certifications and accreditations as part of commitment to data protection. Forrester said it this way in their 2015 Infor Report: “Using cloud services means that your data is better protected than if most of us tried to manage it on our own… Large-scale services are all much better than we are at avoiding data loss from gear failure, keeping software up to date, upgrading hardware, and constantly improving security.”

5. Lower overall costs.

SaaS solutions generally drive down costs for clients, as no hardware, software development, IT resources, machines, or servers are needed. In fact, according to a report by Gartner in late 2015, cloud BI vendors have a below-average three-year Business Intelligence Platform Ownership Cost (BIPOC) per user with a very favorable (the lowest) hardware-cost-per-user profile and low initial implementation costs. Finally, with subscription pricing models, it’s easier to budget and have a clear idea of costs even as you scale across the enterprise.

Still not convinced? We just wrapped things up at the Gartner BI Summit, showing attendees why customers choose Domo for its ease-of-use and quick time to value. If you weren’t able to catch us, you can check out the live stream from the event here: #GartnerBI #Domo