BI and DW in the cloud has been avoided by companies for a while now. There are many reasons that are attributed for the slow start.
Companies want to play the wait and watch approach when it comes to moving BI to the cloud
The offered solutions were not straightforward and not much cost effective
Employees needed to be retrained if a new analytics application is forced on them
But with Amazon’s new Redshift service, the DW in the cloud can be integrated with the existing Business Intelligence tools. This is a big step in the right direction. There are significant advantages to using Redshift vs traditional Data warehouse.
Scaling the service is a breeze and you can expand at will ( Flexible )
Predicted to be 1/10th the cost in maintaining the data warehouse.(Cost effective)
Integrates with existing business intelligence tools. ( Ease of use )
No maintenance and deployment issues.
From amazon’s blog
Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. It is optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
Introductory video about Amazon Redshift
I don’t see a better narrative or a time to start moving to a cloud based BI solution than now. And Redshift is Amazon’s way of saying “Your Move Teradata”..
Useful Links
Redshift:http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/
Pricing : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/amazon-redshift-now-broadly-available.html
Microstrategy Integration :https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00A41ASWK/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-4&qid=1360808044401
