by Angela Guess
A recent article reports, “One of the most fundamental decisions that business intelligence implementers in IT make, at the beginning of every new BI initiative, is whether the new data involved should be copied into a central data mart or data warehouse or accessed where it is. The advent of software as a service (SaaS) and the public cloud has added a new dimension to this decision: Now the BI implementer must also decide whether to move the data physically into the cloud and ‘de-link’ the cloud and internal data stores.
It continues, “In fact, this decision is no longer the purview solely of the CTO – the security concerns when you move data to a public service provider mean that corporate needs to have input into the decision. However, fundamentally, the decision is the same: Move the one copy of the data; keep the one copy where it is; or copy the data, move one copy, and synchronize between copies.”
The article adds, “The reason that it is time to revisit the ‘move or stay’ decision now is that business intelligence users, and therefore the BI IT that supports them, are faced with an unprecedented opportunity and an unprecedented problem. The opportunity, which now as never before is available not only to large but also medium-sized firms, is to gather mammoth amounts of new customer data on the Web and use rapid-fire BI on that data to drive faster ‘customer-of-one’ and agile product development and sales.”
photo credit: angelocesare
