Introduction
The cloud comes as an innovative storage solution for businesses in the current complex business environment. Being Huge, On-Demand and Quick are some of the characteristics that make it the most cost-effective infrastructure option available in the present times. When integrated with Business Intelligence, it is possible to access the data and transform it into actionable business insights. In this article, we will be looking at Cloud Business Intelligence and the Top 5 Cloud Business Intelligence tools for 2022.
What is Cloud Business Intelligence?
Cloud Business Intelligence can be defined as transforming business data into actionable insights by integrating business intelligence with cloud infrastructure, facilitating the businesses to make data-driven decisions by providing them with the required information.
Cloud Business Intelligence applications help businesses analyze their operating health, identify future trends and thus make critical business decisions. They are used to provide company intelligence-related data to the organizations, such as Dashboards, KPIs, and other types of business analytics. Various cloud-based tools such as Customer Relationship Management(CRM) applications such as Salesforce, Online File Collaboration, and Storage applications such as Dropbox, Box, and help desk software such as UserVoice, Zendesk, etc., are gaining much popularity today. These Cloud Hosted BI applications make business data more accessible than before.
Top 5 Cloud BI Tools for 2022
There are large numbers of Cloud BI tools available in the market, and here we have identified some of the best Cloud BI tools that can be used by organizations to collect, organize, visualize and analyze the data collected by business organizations to identify trends and generate various valuable insights for actionable data-based decision-making. You must have heard about Power BI visual and its usage in the industry. Except that, some of the best Cloud BI tools are listed below:-
1. Oracle Analytics –
Oracle Analytics as a BI tool is the best choice for large enterprises looking for advanced AI and ML capabilities. Oracle Analytics tool leverages embedded Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning(ML) to analyze the data and offer predictions for better decision making. It helps with data management, integration, reporting, analysis, visualization, and many more and thus assists the organization in enhancing its performance by making more intelligent decisions.
Key Features of Oracle Analytics:-
- Oracle analytics is a scalable solution that grows with your business.
- Oracle analytics is mobile-enabled, meaning that it can be explored through mobile devices.
- It offers various data connectors to connect to data sources in the cloud, on-premises, or on your desktop.
- It helps in seamless collaboration by easy sharing of results and reports.
2. Microstrategy –
Microstrategy is an enterprise-level BI tool that merges self-service data preparation and visual data discovery and thus provides access to all enterprise data and performs data visualization. It offers out-of-the-box gateways and native drivers connecting to any enterprise resource, including databases, cloud applications, and physical access control devices.
Key Features of Microstrategy:-
- It provides location-based data analytics by putting the relevant data into their geographies, thus making it more relatable.
- It offers proper Data Visualization through color-rich interactive reports.
- It has an embedded analytics tool that allows it to be embedded in other web pages and applications.
- It offers a self-service dashboard that helps you to track key business metrics.
3. Qlik –
Qlik is a Business Intelligence and Analytics tool that allows you to create dashboards, apps, and visualizations, by offering a complete BI suite enabling you to deploy, design, and manage data without any coding. It helps create interactive and flexible data visualizations and provides you with dashboard multi-cloud data integration.
Key Features of Qlik:-
- It adapts quickly to the changes, updates, and integrations.
- It provides you with a Qlik catalog which helps offers you a simplified view of your business data.
- Qlik helps organizations with data replication, injection, and streaming.
- It offers business three significant functions – Data Analytics, Data Integration, and Data Literacy.
4. Tableau –
Tableau is one of the most popular and straightforward BI tools that offer an expansive visual BI and Analytics. It helps you understand the complex data and customize and embed data analytics with your products. It provides a user-friendly interface, and its drag and drop functionality simplifies complex tasks.
Key Features of Tableau:-
- It helps to explore and understand data better through the live charts.
- It allows dashboard and tool sharing to allow group analysis on a dataset.
- Tableau can automatically update data, thus providing real-time information.
- Tableau Blueprint functionality helps you create a whole strategy to create a data-driven organization.
5. Sisense –
Sisense is a Business Intelligence tool and Analytics platform that is best for building and deploying analytics apps. Its primary purpose is to gather, analyze and visualize datasets, making it easier for business organizations to identify business insights from complex data. Sisense is sold as a Single-Stack solution with a backend for preparing and modeling data.
Key Features of Sisense:-
- Its drag and drop feature allows you to merge data from multiple sources to access actionable insights.
- It helps you to identify and rectify the data blunders,
- It offers an ETL facility, report and query writer, customized dashboards, and data warehouses.
- Sisense can be used to work on all sizes of datasets without any complications.
Advantages of Cloud Business Intelligence
In current times, Cloud Business Intelligence is helping business organizations of almost every size, and there are various benefits of leveraging Cloud BI solutions. Let us look at some of the benefits of considering Cloud BI over on-premise applications:-
Ease of Use –
Cloud BI applications tend to be easier to operate by the end-users and set up. Users can quickly deploy Cloud BI solutions using internet-based software, which results in decreased IT involvement and costs.
Data Security –
Cloud BI applications have adequate data security management, ensuring that the company data is secured in all the phases, whether in flight, on rest, or in use. Cloud BI applications go beyond relying on single sign-on authentication (SSO) security solutions, encryption, and multi-factor authentication to ensure adequate security.
Accessibility –
Accessibility is another advantage of Cloud BI applications. Most of the Cloud BI applications can be accessed on any web browser or any mobile device, making it easier for users to access the applications at their convenience.
Cost-Effective –
Cloud BI applications are cost-effective compared to the On-Premise applications as organizations do not require a huge budget to acquire various software and hardware. Organizations can use the Cloud BI applications by paying nominal charges. Also, they do not need to incur expenses on the acquisition of assets, which reduces the overall costs for the businesses.
Scalability and Reliability –
Cloud BI tools are scalable and reliable because they can be rapidly scaled as per the need of the business to accommodate the increase in the number of users in the organization. They are dedicated as they take care of all the needs of the end-users to perform advanced analytics, including infrastructure, redundancy, data refresh capability, etc.
Conclusion
We are witnessing the disruption of Cloud, and Cloud and Business Intelligence is an ideal match that offers various benefits to business organizations. This article introduces you to Cloud Business Intelligence and its advantages to businesses. We looked at the top 5 Cloud BI tools to help the company in data integration, analytics, visualization, and unique features.