You know your organization needs to tap into data in new ways to thrive, delight customers, and beat the competition. That's why you've made the shift from traditional, on-premises databases to the cloud. But here's the problem: bringing the same old business intelligence solutions that worked in the on-premises era to today's cloud-first world is a recipe for disaster.
Those tools were built for a world where data was smaller, slower, and mostly used for backward-looking reporting. In the cloud, your data moves faster, comes from more places, and needs to support decisions that happen in real time. If your BI layer can’t keep up, your teams end up right back where they started, waiting on dashboards, exporting to spreadsheets, and making decisions based on stale or incomplete information.
That’s where cloud business intelligence comes in.
What is cloud business intelligence?
Cloud business intelligence is a modern approach to business intelligence, specifically designed to directly query cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, and AWS Redshift. These solutions take advantage of the scale, speed, and interactivity that only cloud ecosystems can deliver.
Cloud BI connects to your cloud data, organizes it into a data model, and analyzes it to extract insights that inform decision-making. The most useful cloud BI tools go a step further, allowing you to find insights and automatically drive actions based on them.
The process often requires combining different data sources, including:
Customer information
Sales and financial data
Operational data
External data sources
This data is organized into a single cloud platform, whether a cloud data warehouse or a data lakehouse. This integration is essential for you to understand and act on customer behaviors, identify trends, avoid unnecessary risk, and plan for the future.
Why cloud business intelligence is important
Cloud business intelligence gives every team access to the same live data, no matter where they work. The result? Faster, smarter decision-making powered by real-time insights delivered through scalable cloud infrastructure. Teams across every department can collaborate seamlessly with consistent, up-to-date data at their fingertips.
But that's not all. Cloud BI integrates seamlessly with modern data warehouses and supports advanced analytics capabilities, including AI and machine learning. Plus, with automatic updates and maintenance handled for you, your business can stay focused on what really matters: strategy, performance, and driving results, not managing IT infrastructure.
How cloud business intelligence works
Cloud BI tools in the modern data stack use various methods to collect, organize, move, and process data. Whether you're using ELT or ETL, these tools connect to your existing data sources, such as databases or spreadsheets.
The data gets processed using algorithms and statistical models. It's then ready for analysis by cloud BI to find insights. These insights can be presented in data visualizations, like bar charts or histograms, shared with other users, and used to inform decisions that drive business performance.
Cloud business intelligence vs. traditional BI
|
Traditional BI |
Cloud BI |
|
Data copied into proprietary systems |
Queries data directly in your warehouse |
|
Slow dashboard refreshes |
Live, on-demand analysis |
|
High IT overhead |
Maintenance handled automatically |
|
Limited to power users |
Self-service across teams |
Cloud BI differs from traditional business intelligence in where and how data is stored, processed, and accessed.
Traditional BI systems rely on on-premises infrastructure, which often limits scalability, requires significant maintenance, and slows down access to insights.
Cloud BI runs in cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. This allows you to store and analyze vast amounts of data without managing physical servers. The approach provides real-time access to data, supports collaboration among distributed teams, and integrates seamlessly with modern data platforms.
As a result, cloud BI provides faster, more flexible, and cost-effective analytics, while traditional BI tends to be slower, less adaptable, and more resource-intensive.
Why cloud business intelligence matters
Companies that have adopted cloud BI are already experiencing a range of benefits, including:
Integration of external data sources
Better decision-making at all levels
Higher ROI on cloud infrastructure investments
Cloud BI can help create a truly data-driven organization by providing quick, easy access to insights.
Top four benefits of cloud business intelligence
When your data lives in the cloud, you can see what's happening across the business faster and more clearly. Here are four practical advantages you’ll see right away.
1. Increased data visibility
You've historically struggled with siloed data, where information from different systems remains isolated. By moving data to the cloud, these barriers are broken down, creating a far more holistic view of your business.
Effective cloud BI solutions integrate directly with cloud data platforms. This allows you to interrogate this data in its entirety. This increased visibility helps you get a true 360-degree view of your operations.
2. Improved collaboration
With the rise of remote, hybrid, and global teams that dominate today's market, collaboration has never been more essential to success. With cloud BI, your teams can collaborate more effectively by sharing data insights in real-time. Team members can access the same dataset, enabling more accurate analysis and easier opportunity spotting.
3. Faster time from insight to action
Time is money, and if you're waiting on insights to make decisions, you're leaving value on the table. That changes with cloud BI solutions, particularly when part of a self-service BI strategy. Instead of waiting to get a new dashboard built, you can ask and answer your own questions quickly, and more importantly, act on these insights.
Instead of waiting for new dashboards, you should be able to just ask the question you have and get the answer. That’s where ThoughtSpot comes in. It includes Spotter, your AI analyst, which lets you type a question like “What drove the revenue spike in Q3?” and get a clear, directly usable explanation, no back-and-forth with analysts, no waiting in dashboard queues.
4. Reduced costs
Getting started with any form of business analytics, particularly business intelligence, can be daunting because of the cost, time, and resources required. With cloud BI, you save on costs associated with setting up expensive IT infrastructure and software.
The right self-service business intelligence tool also frees up expensive data teams, like analytics and data engineers, from the constant work of updating and fixing dashboards. This gives them bandwidth to take on more strategic and complex data initiatives.
Common cloud business intelligence use cases
By combining the best of the cloud with modern BI, you can maximize your data initiatives. You can quickly and accurately analyze data from various sources, find rich, meaningful insights, and take action.
There are numerous use cases for cloud BI, but the following six are among the most important:
1. Reporting
You can't always expect users to know when to analyze data or create a report. With cloud BI solutions, you don't have to. Instead, you can implement automated analytics and self-service reporting. This streamlines the process for sharing information with teams, establishes expectations for data and insights (essential for building data literacy), and ensures that business stakeholders receive them at regular intervals.
2. Operational efficiency
Your business lives and dies on margins. Cloud BI can dramatically improve operational efficiency and reduce costs by providing domain experts with real-time insights into operations. This lets them understand where there are avenues to reduce costs, capitalize on opportunities, and ultimately improve performance.
3. Customer insights
Companies that delight their customers lead their field. Doing so requires a deep understanding of these customers. With cloud BI, you can access data that captures all the touchpoints a customer has with your organization. This enables tailored decisions that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, build effective marketing campaigns, and deliver personalized experiences.
4. Predictive analytics
Knowing what's happening in your business is powerful, but with cloud BI solutions, you can incorporate predictive analytics to go beyond today and understand future trends and potential opportunities. This often requires bringing machine learning and predictive models into a cloud business intelligence platform. The best platforms treat these models like any other data source, giving you access to the value of data science at scale.
5. Data visualization
Cloud BI solutions provide powerful visualization tools that quickly clarify insights and make them communicable to other stakeholders. You can view data in various formats and identify patterns or trends that can be further explored. The most valuable of these tools provides interactive data visualization, allowing you to drill into your data, answering not only the first question, but the inevitable second, third, and fourth questions.
For teams working with complex datasets, tools like Analyst Studio provide advanced visualization capabilities that let you create sophisticated charts and interactive dashboards without switching between multiple platforms.
6. Augmented analytics
For some organizations, cloud BI opens up an entirely new opportunity to capitalize on augmented analytics. These include capabilities such as natural language search and natural language queries, enabling users of all skill levels to reap the benefits of data.
What to look for in a cloud business intelligence tool
When you’re evaluating cloud BI platforms, focus on how well they support the way your teams actually work. Look for a tool that offers:
Scalability and real-time data connectivity: The platform should query data where it already lives (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, etc.), not require you to copy or move it. This keeps insights fresh and reduces pipeline complexity.
Intuitive, self-service analytics: If only analysts can answer questions, you’re not really scaling analytics. Business users should be able to explore data and ask ad-hoc questions on their own, without waiting in dashboard queues.
Strong security and governance features: You shouldn’t have to trade speed for control. Look for role-based access, auditability, and a strong semantic layer, so every team works from consistent definitions.
Advanced capabilities: Natural language search, automated insights, and guided analysis help users go beyond static dashboards. This is especially important when you need to support large, distributed teams.
Seamless integration: Insights shouldn’t live in isolation. The tool should work naturally with your existing cloud stack and let teams share insights inside the apps where work already happens (Slack, Sheets, Salesforce, etc.).
Put your data to work across your organization
Cloud BI is a new way to access and analyze your data that can benefit businesses of all sizes. If you're looking for a way to improve your decision-making process, give ThoughtSpot a try. With our free trial, you'll see how easy it is to use cloud BI in your organization.
Sign up today and see how ThoughtSpot can help you make better decisions for your business.
Cloud business intelligence FAQs
How does cloud BI integrate with cloud data warehouses?
Cloud BI tools connect directly to cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks. These secure connections enable real-time querying and analysis without moving data between systems. You always work with current, accurate information.
Using APIs and native connectors, cloud BI blends data from multiple sources, processes it within the warehouse, and displays results through visual dashboards and reports.
What's the difference between SaaS BI vs. self-managed BI in the cloud?
The difference between Software-as-a-Service BI and self-managed BI in the cloud lies in how the tools are hosted, maintained, and managed.
SaaS BI solutions are fully hosted by the vendor, meaning the provider handles setup, maintenance, updates, and security, allowing you to access analytics through a web browser with minimal IT involvement.
Self-managed BI in the cloud gives you greater control by enabling you to deploy and manage the BI platform in your own cloud environment. This allows greater customization and governance, but requires more technical expertise and ongoing management.
SaaS BI is ideal if you're seeking simplicity, speed, and lower maintenance, while self-managed BI suits you if you have specific security, compliance, or integration requirements.
How do organizations migrate from legacy BI systems to cloud BI platforms?
You can migrate from legacy BI systems to cloud BI platforms through a structured process focusing on data, technology, and user adoption.
The first step is to assess your existing infrastructure and identify which data, reports, and workflows need to be moved.
Next, you select a cloud BI platform that aligns with your data architecture and business goals.
Data is then extracted, cleaned, and transferred to the new environment, often using ETL or ELT pipelines to ensure accuracy and consistency.
Finally, users are trained to use the new platform effectively, and governance policies are established to ensure security and compliance.
This allows you to transition smoothly while maximizing the value of your cloud analytics investment.
How does cloud BI support big data-scale analytics?
Cloud BI handles big-data-scale analytics by leveraging the scalability and computing power of cloud platforms. While traditional systems struggle with large datasets, cloud BI processes massive volumes of data from multiple sources in real time.
With parallel processing and machine learning integrations, cloud BI delivers predictive and prescriptive analytics at scale. This lets you efficiently analyze large datasets and turn them into actionable insights across your organization.
