Adoption of cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solutions has grown for three consecutive years, according to the latest edition of the annual survey conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC). Eighteen percent of respondents said they have adopted mobile BI systems, but the growth has been slower than many expected.

“Despite continued hype in this area, we still see relatively few organizations using mobile BI,” said BARC CEO Carsten Bange. “Concern over data security is an important factor here, as well as the extra investment required to enable mobile access to corporate data. However, while the situation is improving, there’s still a lack of convincing mobile BI solutions on the market.”

On the other hand, an article in Smart Data Collective points out that mobile solutions bring significant cost savings. Those savings not only benefit the end user, but also extend to the manager of the data center itself. According to the author, cloud computing centers require 20 percent less investment in cooling and power distribution, and 6 percent less in labor costs than traditional data centers.

The benefits of business intelligence on the cloud are not just financial. The cloud helps business processes run more smoothly by making data easily accessible to an entire organization and reducing its dependency on hardware. The cloud is also more flexible, and allows for more data sources to be collated and for faster adaptation to changing needs.

ETL tools help companies simplify the complex process of drawing data from the cloud, where gigabytes of information reside and it is often hard to tell what is truly useful. An ETL system transforms all that data into a single format and makes it easy to analyze.