Moving Business Intelligence to cloud environments

Abstract

Business Intelligence systems use information technology to supply integrated management support with data coming from several sources of structured and unstructured data. The integrated infrastructures of Business Intelligence (BI) are often too complex and hence costly and inflexible. A solution for these issues is to leverage cloud computing services to enhance legacy BI systems and applications with cost-efficient increased scalability and flexibility. However, the migration of BI systems to cloud environments is usually hindered by strict requirements regarding privacy, security, or availability and a multitude of interdependences with other systems. In this paper, we describe the challenges in the adoption of BI within cloud environments and propose a cloud migration framework to assist decision makers in taking into account the consequences of the migration of BI systems to cloud environments as well as the impact of privacy, security, cost, and performance in so doing.