Business Intelligence (BI) has been the center of any digital transformation, helping organisations to generate meaningful insights from real-time raw data. Providing the right information to the right people has been a reason for businesses to invest a large sum of money on BI software license, maintenance, and adapting to specific needs.
As any BI will use sensitive data and information, the security and access to these reports are paramount. One of the solutions we used was building a real-time dashboard and insights where KPIs and access could be securely provided. With the increase of Cloud Computing, there are huge benefits to scalability and affordable solutions in comparison with existing on-premise solutions. We’ve made a video using AWS Quicksight, using a dataset of 150,000 entries (3 years content) to demonstrate how easy it is to set up a quick dashboard and filter data accurately.
Below are 5 benefits of using a Cloud-based Business Intelligence platform.
1. Fast and accurate insights using any data source type
Most BI tools will provide data source compatibility, from simple CSV files to SaaS data sources or relational data sources. One of the benefits of Quicksight is its fast SPICE engine (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine), for a non-technical user is offering the ability to process and analyse large amounts of data at lightning speeds. Using the latest hardware technology, Cloud solutions have a huge advantage comparing with on-premise solutions.
2. Embed analytics securely in custom applications
Any business now is a software business, providing access to analytics to your users is important. Real-time dashboards and analytics reports are required in any online platform, but also are using a large volume of resources. Microsoft Power BI offers the ability to embed dashboards, but the end-user must have a Power BI account to access it. With Quicksight, the dashboard can be embedded and accessible only from dedicated websites / IPs.
3. Cost-effective and faster Return of Investment
BI tools can be expensive, adding IT support & BI Manager could be the reason why some organisation have doubts about seeing any Return of Investment. The average budget of a startup is around £6,000 – some BI infrastructures can easily cost more than that.
Quicksight’s pay-per-session pricing makes it accessible to any business. It starts from $5 per month, all you need is to connect any data source and pay for the number of active users. There are no annual commitments, in case your business has seasonal periods you can easily deactivate users and save licensing costs.
Free task automation - Apply now!
2 weeks development - bespoke task automation
4. Your data will be secure
There have always been concerns about data security and risks with online & cloud hosting, but the majority of incidents are not the infrastructure faults and more on human interaction with it. 83% of the reported breaches has been related to human error.
If your data source is already in the AWS environment, Quicksight’s connection is secure and automated. External sources are connected either through an API bridge, or secured tunnels, so there is no reason for a data breach.
The ability of embedding the dashboards in any application is beneficial in allowing access to sensitive data to external users, restricting any public access.
5. Ease of use and flexibility
One of the best reasons, as the application is running in cloud this can be accessible from anywhere. Once the data sources are set up properly, you don’t need any technical expertise to set your own dashboards. As we have shown in our demo video, you can easily set visual charts and filter data with a few clicks.
Data sources are set to automatically synchronise, therefore your main systems will not be affected while running large reports.
