THE cloud, or a cloud; your BI application wants everything!

During the Integration Knowledge Session of Enable U last summer, the question was asked how to deal with BI (Business Intelligence) specialists who ask for data from SaaS applications. The challenges are great, but the needs greater!

The question in itself is simple; all management and executives need information so that they can make quick and well-founded decisions. The data that helps this decision making is distributed throughout the company and is connected to various applications. Sometimes on-premise, sometimes in the cloud, as part of a standard application or as data from third parties such as Chamber of Commerce data.

As part of its ICT policy, the Dutch government has decided that data must be retrieved from the source. And there are good reasons for this:

• At the source, the data has the right value. (It’s not “second-hand” data that’s been tampered with.)
• It is always clear who the owner is.
• No unnecessary data extracts are created that will be lying around without us knowing where privacy-sensitive data is stored and by whom this data can be viewed.

When is ‘retrieving at the source’ possible?

Every organization should have this retrieving at the source as its goal, precisely for the reasons mentioned above. But this is only possible if there is a watertight integration strategy where thought has been given to the architecture, which data from which SaaS applications are important for BI specialists and whether this data can be read directly from the production environment in the cloud or whether, for reasons of performance, a local shadow file must / can be worked with.

After that, it’s just a matter of finding the right integration specialists and building the links that are needed. Precisely because we retrieve the data from the source, security, technical performance and the rapid construction of these links are of the utmost importance.

We are ‘the digital integration people’ of Enable U and we have dealt with problems many times. So let us inform you how it can be easier….