1. Hexaware E-book on
Q & A for Cloud BI
Hexaware Business Intelligence & Analytics
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2. © Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved.
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HEXAWARE Q & A
E-BOOK ON CLOUD BI
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing can be defined as a solution in which all users share the
available resources as and when needed. It can be identified by some
characteristics such as elasticity (i.e. the capability to scale up or down on
demand), multi-tenancy, pay-per-use etc.
What is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)?
SaaS facilitates running of online applications. The vendors completely
manage the applications while the users pay a ‘service’ charge. It is
suitable only for generic applications and not for custom, complex ones.
PaaS aprovides the platform to allow the creation of new web (cloud)
applications. Since moving applications between platforms is cumbersome
there is an increased risk of vendor lock-in. Vendors manage everything
but the applications.
IaaS replaces a company’s infrastructure by allowing applications to run on
the vendor’s cloud hardware. The onus of managing the environment is
equally shared between the user and the vendor.
Provide major SaaS, PaaS and IaaS vendors in the market
SaaS: Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Google Docs
PaaS: Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Force.com
IaaS: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid, VMware,
CA Technologies, Bluemile.
Explain the different cloud computing deployment models
Public Clouds are available publicly (to ‘all’), owned and provisioned by a
cloud services vendor. A public cloud simply indicates shared resources
available over the Internet from a third-party provider. These resources are
typically available on pay-per-use models.
Layers
Applications
Databases
Security
Runtimes
Networking
Storage
Server Hardware
Virtualization
Servers
PaaS
Self-managed
Everything except
the applications is
managed by the
vendor
IaaS
Self-managed
Vendor managed
SaaS
Completely
managed
by the vendor

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Private Clouds thrive within your organization’s fortress of privacy, are
indigenously managed (by your own IT team) or by a third party vendor and
may be established on-premise or off-premise. They are cloud services
you create and control within your enterprise. The benefits offered by
Private clouds differ from that offered by public clouds in that they are
harnessed with higher data security and reliability.
Hybrid Clouds are a combination of the public and the private cloud.
Management responsibilities are equally shared between the vendor and
the enterprise itself.
Community Clouds are cloud services shared among several
organizations/enterprises that form a community with same/similar
purposes of existence. Management can be either done by the enterprises
or an off-site third party cloud provider and they may be established
on-premise or off-premise.
What is multi-tenancy?
Multi-tenancy is a technical mechanism in Cloud computing that supports
multi-tenants (i.e. customers) in the same operating environment. It
ensures necessary isolation of customers’ privilege resources in a shared
environment. A key characteristic for multi-tenancy is that one tenant’s data
is effectively isolated from other tenants’ authorization.
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’.
What is cloud BI?
Cloud BI Jaspersoft defines a cloud-based business intelligence platform
as one that makes use of IaaS, complements and extends today's PaaS,
utilizes an on-demand, virtualized, elastic software and hardware
environment, and delivers application-level functionality as a service
(commonly referred to as SaaS)
Cloud Computing Types
Private
Public
Public
Public
Public
Hybrid

4. What are the primary Pros and Cons of cloud based (or SaaS) BI?
Pros:
• Potential for faster deployments since little to no infrastructure is
required
• Scalability
• Reduced total cost of ownership
• Pay-on-demand
• Reduction in carbon footprint due to no or limited hardware
Cons:
Vendor ‘lock-in’ – Switching between cloud vendors
• Not suited for mission/machine critical apps where downtime cannot
be afforded
• No or limited control
Why is cloud BI touted to be a game-changer?
The use of BI in cloud makes it affordable and accessible to those who
need it. Traditional BI systems have always been very expensive: right
from bringing up a system to maintaining it. Also, the users who needed
these BI systems had no access, leaving them incapable of taking any
critical business decisions. With cloud BI, the cost drops dramatically with
a web browser being the primary or the only requirement in most cases. It
also renders better support to dashboards or reports intended for the next
generation mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
What are some of the scenarios where Cloud BI can be
recommended?
Cloud (SaaS) based BI can be recommended when:
• You require lots of elasticity in terms of usage, price and volume
• You don’t need mission-critical SLAs
• You are not dependent on offline/disconnected architecture
• You don’t need the maturity of on-premise BI platforms and solutions
What are some of the risk mitigation steps and strategies to look
into while adopting Cloud BI?
• Perform due diligence for security, back up and disaster recovery
• Do not overlook pricing and contract matters
• Evaluate long term total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Do not fail to test platforms through proof-of-concept programs
• Check out support offerings like communities, discussion forums and
blogs
How do virtualization and private cloud initiatives impact BI
applications?
BI is all about agility and clearly technology such as cloud that enables
important technology such as BI to improve business agility is very
important. Cloud provides a new delivery channel for firms to get their BI
services more cheaply than the typical seven-figure BI/DW and data
integration deal. An example would be Jaspersoft, an open source BI tool
that while installed in client sites, can run optimally in a virtualized,
cloud-enabled x86 environment
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One of the central issues with ‘Big Data’ volume is the issue of how to most
effectively store and analyze it, and in fact the cloud is ideal for this, which
is why companies like NetApp are beginning to offer hosted “near-IaaS”
Hadoop solutions that feature infrastructure optimized for I/O intensive
analytic workloads.
Are portability options available with cloud vendors?
Today, it is fairly possible that businesses may get “locked in” with a cloud
vendor. One of the important reasons for this situation is the fact that a
majority of cloud vendors in the market have developed non-interoperable
solutions. This is a consequence of the fact that there are no
interoperability standards for cloud computing available today.
Interoperability standards and frameworks for interoperating between
clouds are still evolving and should become mature in the years to come.
Why should traditional BI vendors adopt Cloud BI when it
jeopardizes their revenues from selling licenses?
Traditional BI vendors can and would welcome Cloud BI; they just have to
change their strategy. Instead of making money by selling licenses to few
major companies (who can afford the huge licensing costs) they can make
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.
What are the other mega trends alongside Cloud BI?
Today there are three mega trends: Cloud BI, Social media and Mobile BI
each feeding into the other. The reason these are inter-dependent is
because of what they can offer to the end user. For e.g. some of the key
advantages of Mobile BI are increased employee productivity, improved
agility and enhanced collaboration. Social media offers real-time data that
can be crucial in making strategic business decisions at the right time.
Cloud BI proves to be ‘the’ platform to tap the potential of the other two
mega trends to the fullest because of its great time-to-value, quick & cheap
deployment, scalability and less to no administration requirements among
others. When all the three mega trends work in tandem, the expectations of
today’s end-user can be easily met.
How is data loaded into a cloud-based data warehouse?
Loading data into a cloud-based data warehouse is no different from how it
works in any on-premise DBMS. Once a schema is defined, the data can
be extracted and transferred using standard migration tools available with
the vendor. You can use commercial ETL tools to perform transformations
and take care of the business logic. The instance in the cloud appears like
any other database instance in your organization.

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