A Taxonomy for Describing BI Cloud Services

Cloud computing is still a driver of many innovations. The cloud comes with features nowadays required in the area of Business Intelligence (BI). BI Cloud offerings are proactive, integrated tools for reporting that are mobile accessible, flexible and scalable. BI in the Cloud is becoming increasingly popular, but a comprehensive reference architecture for describtion, comparison and evaluation of BI Cloud services does not exist yet. A universal model to describe Cloud services in general exists. This, however, is too generic to be applicable to BI Cloud services. Even several conceptual frameworks to describe and characterize explicit BI Cloud services exist. But, as they are developed by different groups and organizations, they differ in their intention, level of description, type of formulation, and in terms of which key issues of BI Cloud service evaluation are addressed. To help overcome the prevalent skepticism of enterprises regarding BI Cloud services, we surveyed different frameworks and approaches for describe and compare BI Cloud services. Based on this survey and the universal model for Cloud service offerings we propose a consolidated taxonomy as an extension of the existing general taxonomy with the aim to uniformly describe, compare and evaluate BI Cloud services.