Transforming the Economics of Data Warehousing with Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is ushering in a new era of analytic data management for business intelligence (BI) by enabling organizations to analyze terabytes of data faster and more economically than ever before. The key change: cloud database software is provisioned within minutes, without data center overhead, and it's licensed on an on-demand basis. The table below shows that organizations no longer need to justify spending hundreds of thousands of capital expense budget dollars for upfront hardware and software purchases or spend weeks waiting for hardware delivery and installation. Instead, they can sign up to tap into a computing cloud, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Upon signup, Amazon EC2 completely provisions a secure, fully clustered high-performance analytic database that is hosted in the cloud and immediately ready to serve the customer's needs exclusively. They can then use it on a pay-per-use basis, usually for a monthly fee.