Cloud BI Acceleration

Over the years, there has been a massive increase in the amount of data enterprises deal with. This surge in the flow of data has created limitations for the BI and analytical tools making it difficult for them to perform. It takes from minutes to hours to fetch the required data from the cloud storage and query responses take longer to return. This creates difficulties for the business users being deprived of important insights for decision making.

A solution to this critical business problem for achieving instant insights on massive data volumes without exploding costs is the creation of an aggregation layer between the cloud and BI tools. This aggregation layer created on top of the cloud platform helps to accelerate the performance of BI tools and is called the Cloud BI Acceleration Layer.

How does Cloud BI Acceleration work?

 
To begin with the bottom most layer in this set-up consists of cloud storage platforms like GCP. AWS, and Azure and cloud Data Warehouses like Snowflake and Azure Synapse. These platforms store all the enterprise data in bulk. This data keeps on increasing daily as new customers, products, and regions are added to the database.

The top layer comprises of the BI and analytics tools like Tableau, MicroStrategy, Excel, Power BI, Looker, etc. These tools are used by business stakeholders to generate queries and derive insights from the raw data. However, as the data goes to increase beyond millions and billions of rows, these tools become rather slow and start facing performance issues.

Building a BI Acceleration layer on top of the cloud storage layer allows you to create aggregates of the raw data and stores them in a scalable data cube. These aggregates are the pre-calculated responses of user queries. So, the next time a user runs a query on the data, the BI tools can directly search the pre-calculated response from the Cloud BI Acceleration layer and deliver insights in seconds.

For instance, if you want to know how your sales this year compare to that of the previous year, your BI tool will no longer have to go searching billions of rows of data to calculate the response. It can pick up the pre-calculated response directly from the Cloud BI Acceleration layer and serve you.

Advantages of Cloud BI Acceleration Layer

The Cloud BI Acceleration layer serves two purposes. One, it does all the heavy lifting on the data and lets you access query responses instantly. So, you can process-once, and access many times. Two, it acts as a semantic model, letting you define all complex data relations, definitions and logics so that your users can access a single source of truth across the enterprise.