A guide to understand all about Cloud computing & its deployment models focusing the Pros and Cons of cloud based Business Intelligence.

1. Hexaware E-book on
Q & A for Cloud BI
Hexaware Business Intelligence & Analytics
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Actionable Intelligence Enabled

2. HEXAWARE Q & A Layers IaaS PaaS SaaS
E-BOOK ON CLOUD BI Applications
Databases
Self-managed
Self-managed
Security
What is cloud computing? Runtimes Everything except Completely
Networking the applications is managed
Cloud computing can be defined as a solution in which all users share the Storage
managed by the
vendor
by the vendor
Vendor managed
available resources as and when needed. It can be identified by some Server Hardware
characteristics such as elasticity (i.e. the capability to scale up or down on Virtualization
demand), multi-tenancy, pay-per-use etc. Servers
What is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service
Provide major SaaS, PaaS and IaaS vendors in the market
(PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)?
SaaS: Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Google Docs
SaaS facilitates running of online applications. The vendors completely
manage the applications while the users pay a ‘service’ charge. It is PaaS: Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Force.com
suitable only for generic applications and not for custom, complex ones. IaaS: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid, VMware,
PaaS aprovides the platform to allow the creation of new web (cloud) CA Technologies, Bluemile.
applications. Since moving applications between platforms is cumbersome
there is an increased risk of vendor lock-in. Vendors manage everything Explain the different cloud computing deployment models
but the applications. Public Clouds are available publicly (to ‘all’), owned and provisioned by a
IaaS replaces a company’s infrastructure by allowing applications to run on cloud services vendor. A public cloud simply indicates shared resources
the vendor’s cloud hardware. The onus of managing the environment is available over the Internet from a third-party provider. These resources are
equally shared between the user and the vendor. typically available on pay-per-use models.
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3. Private Clouds thrive within your organization’s fortress of privacy, are Community Clouds are cloud services shared among several
indigenously managed (by your own IT team) or by a third party vendor and organizations/enterprises that form a community with same/similar
may be established on-premise or off-premise. They are cloud services purposes of existence. Management can be either done by the enterprises
you create and control within your enterprise. The benefits offered by or an off-site third party cloud provider and they may be established
Private clouds differ from that offered by public clouds in that they are on-premise or off-premise.
harnessed with higher data security and reliability.
What is multi-tenancy?
Multi-tenancy is a technical mechanism in Cloud computing that supports
Hybrid Clouds are a combination of the public and the private cloud.
multi-tenants (i.e. customers) in the same operating environment. It
Management responsibilities are equally shared between the vendor and
ensures necessary isolation of customers’ privilege resources in a shared
the enterprise itself.
environment. A key characteristic for multi-tenancy is that one tenant’s data
is effectively isolated from other tenants’ authorization.
Cloud Computing Types Tenants can be from the same enterprise (e.g. finance and marketing
departments of a single enterprise) and hence ‘multi-tenancy’ should not
be used interchangeably with the term ‘multi-enterprise’.
Public What is cloud BI?
Cloud BI Jaspersoft defines a cloud-based business intelligence platform
Private
Public
Public as one that makes use of IaaS, complements and extends today's PaaS,
Hybrid
utilizes an on-demand, virtualized, elastic software and hardware
Public environment, and delivers application-level functionality as a service
(commonly referred to as SaaS)
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4. What are the primary Pros and Cons of cloud based (or SaaS) BI? What are some of the scenarios where Cloud BI can be
recommended?
Pros:
Cloud (SaaS) based BI can be recommended when:
• Potential for faster deployments since little to no infrastructure is
• You require lots of elasticity in terms of usage, price and volume
required
• You don’t need mission-critical SLAs
• Scalability
• You are not dependent on offline/disconnected architecture
• Reduced total cost of ownership
• You don’t need the maturity of on-premise BI platforms and solutions
• Pay-on-demand
• Reduction in carbon footprint due to no or limited hardware What are some of the risk mitigation steps and strategies to look
into while adopting Cloud BI?
Cons:
• Perform due diligence for security, back up and disaster recovery
Vendor ‘lock-in’ – Switching between cloud vendors
• Do not overlook pricing and contract matters
• Not suited for mission/machine critical apps where downtime cannot
• Evaluate long term total cost of ownership (TCO)
be afforded
• Do not fail to test platforms through proof-of-concept programs
• No or limited control
• Check out support offerings like communities, discussion forums and
Why is cloud BI touted to be a game-changer? blogs
The use of BI in cloud makes it affordable and accessible to those who
How do virtualization and private cloud initiatives impact BI
need it. Traditional BI systems have always been very expensive: right applications?
from bringing up a system to maintaining it. Also, the users who needed
BI is all about agility and clearly technology such as cloud that enables
these BI systems had no access, leaving them incapable of taking any
important technology such as BI to improve business agility is very
critical business decisions. With cloud BI, the cost drops dramatically with
important. Cloud provides a new delivery channel for firms to get their BI
a web browser being the primary or the only requirement in most cases. It
services more cheaply than the typical seven-figure BI/DW and data
also renders better support to dashboards or reports intended for the next
integration deal. An example would be Jaspersoft, an open source BI tool
generation mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
that while installed in client sites, can run optimally in a virtualized,
cloud-enabled x86 environment
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5. One of the central issues with ‘Big Data’ volume is the issue of how to most What are the other mega trends alongside Cloud BI?
effectively store and analyze it, and in fact the cloud is ideal for this, which Today there are three mega trends: Cloud BI, Social media and Mobile BI
is why companies like NetApp are beginning to offer hosted “near-IaaS” each feeding into the other. The reason these are inter-dependent is
Hadoop solutions that feature infrastructure optimized for I/O intensive because of what they can offer to the end user. For e.g. some of the key
analytic workloads. advantages of Mobile BI are increased employee productivity, improved
agility and enhanced collaboration. Social media offers real-time data that
Are portability options available with cloud vendors? can be crucial in making strategic business decisions at the right time.
Today, it is fairly possible that businesses may get “locked in” with a cloud Cloud BI proves to be ‘the’ platform to tap the potential of the other two
vendor. One of the important reasons for this situation is the fact that a mega trends to the fullest because of its great time-to-value, quick & cheap
majority of cloud vendors in the market have developed non-interoperable deployment, scalability and less to no administration requirements among
solutions. This is a consequence of the fact that there are no others. When all the three mega trends work in tandem, the expectations of
interoperability standards for cloud computing available today. today’s end-user can be easily met.
Interoperability standards and frameworks for interoperating between
clouds are still evolving and should become mature in the years to come. How is data loaded into a cloud-based data warehouse?
Loading data into a cloud-based data warehouse is no different from how it
Why should traditional BI vendors adopt Cloud BI when it works in any on-premise DBMS. Once a schema is defined, the data can
jeopardizes their revenues from selling licenses?
be extracted and transferred using standard migration tools available with
Traditional BI vendors can and would welcome Cloud BI; they just have to the vendor. You can use commercial ETL tools to perform transformations
change their strategy. Instead of making money by selling licenses to few and take care of the business logic. The instance in the cloud appears like
major companies (who can afford the huge licensing costs) they can make any other database instance in your organization.
money by now selling their services/products in a pay-per-use model to a
large number of companies including small and medium enterprises.
Basically, the model changes from earning big with few companies to
earning small with many companies. The upside to this approach is that it
increases their market presence since their clientele would be spread all
across from small, medium to major enterprises.
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