The cloud is becoming a mature platform for data management, integration, business intelligence (BI), and analytics. Although some organizations still will not make use of it (typically for security or compliance reasons), resistance is definitely diminishing. Companies understand that the cloud can provide flexibility and scalability for their BI and analytics projects.

Of course, the cloud is not yet for every company, but organizations like the fact that it allows them to be more agile—they can quickly spin up (or down) instances of the cloud for BI and analytics and they like that. We’ve found that organizations are making use of the cloud in numerous ways.

Some are using it to expand the number of users who can perform visual analytics and discovery and to provide more sophisticated tools than spreadsheets. Others are using the cloud to help modernize their data warehouse for analytics. Still others are using it to experiment with analytics outside of the data warehouse, which often includes experimenting with open source technologies. They are also using the cloud for part of their more advanced analytics implementations, such as for big data analytics.