User adoption of cloud business intelligence tools has jumped over the past three years and will continue to grow, but it’s clear that many organizations are still slow to take the leap because of security concerns even if they’re unfounded, according to multiple observers.
SearchBusinessAnalytics recently explored that hesitation in an interview with Howard Dresner, founder, president and chief research officer at consultancy Dresner Advisory Services. His company has conducted an annual Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study since 2012.
The article points out the Dresner survey found nearly two-third of the vendors consider cloud BI “critically important” to their businesses. However, more than half of them have no plans for cloud deployments.
Security, Privacy Issues Cited
Only 20 percent of the 853 respondents to the 2014 survey said they were running BI applications in public clouds, with 70 percent saying they had no plans to do so. Nearly 50% said they were running BI applications in private clouds or planned to do so by the end of this year. About 30% were running or planning to run both public clouds and hybrid environments, the survey found.
Dresner said there are numerous benefits to cloud BI services, including lower licensing, hardware and ongoing management costs. But concerns are still strong over security and privacy, further spurred by highly public data breaches. Dresner is quick to point out that those breaches occurred in on-premise implementations.
Consultant Wayne Eckerson, in his blog for BeyeNetwork, agrees. “In reality, data is actually safer in the Cloud than in many corporate data centers. The real issue is not security, it’s “control.” Executives today simply feel safer if their data is housed in a corporate data center. (Ironically, most companies have already outsourced sensitive data, like payroll and sales, to third party providers.) To be fair, some companies, especially those in financial services, must comply with regulations that currently require them to keep data on premise,” he writes.
Despite the security concerns, Eckerson says cloud BI is clearly catching on.
Three Types of Cloud Computing
As noted in the survey, organizations have the option for three types of cloud computing. We’ll borrow Eckerson’s definitions of those options:
- Public Cloud. Application and compute resources are managed by a third-party services provider.
- Private Cloud. Application and compute resources are managed by an internal data center team.
- Hybrid Cloud. A private cloud that leverages the public cloud to handle peak capacity; a reserved “private” space within a public cloud; or a hybrid architecture in which some components run in a data center and others in the public cloud.
To be clear, Izenda is not a cloud-based BI application. It platform does not host an organization’s data. However, if an organization wants to add BI functionality to their cloud-based application, they can use Izenda’s embedded solution. Instead of introducing yet another security endpoint to administer, Izenda dynamically inherits the rules, practices and policies that your application implements. Izenda couples tightly with your security.
Abstract Security, Concrete Safety
Izenda is an integration-ready .NET web application that allows organizations with on-premise, cloud, SaaS, and enterprise applications to deliver modern self-service reports, dashboards, and visualizations.
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