Our company is exploring the option of setting up Cognos in a Cloud environment, instead of buying the product as such.
Please share your expertise on how to go about setting Cognos on Cloud and the process involved in it.
Whether it is better to go on a cloud than actually buying the Licensed software.
Thanks,
Alam
Hi,
Is Cognos directly available on Cloud?
I have used Cognos on top of Cloud systems, they perform well. But I am not aware if Cognos is directly available as a part of Cloud.
Regards,
Rahul
hi Rahul,
As you have worked on cognos in some sort of a cloud, can you give ur input regarding wether it is better to go for cloud rather than bought product - costwise
Any input about ur work on the cognos cloud env wud b helpful.
Thanks,
Alam
I think IBM have a preconfigured Cognos 10 instance on the IBM Smart Cloud. I don't know what the costs are like, though.
Regards,
MF.
Rahul,
I have several clients that are using Cognos from a hosting company. The downside is that reports seem to take longer to run and you also lose alot of control over the application. There are certain areas of Cognos Administration that the clients do not have access to at all. So when anything goes wrong or there is any setting that needs to be fixed, they have to call the hosting company which costs $$ and takes time.
What I am talking is implementing Cognos on top of Cloud based systems. This way you save a lot of $$$ in infrastructure and its maintainance. But, Cognos is completely owned by you.
IBM Cognos cloud is not a good option to go for.
Cloud-based deployments only make sense if there's a high variability in resource demand. If you are running a steady-state environment, owning the servers is going to be cheaper (you may want to look at dedicated hosted servers with a provider if you just don't want stuff in-house). You still need to meet all licensing requirements for the product.
Scenarios where cloud-based deployments of Cognos might make sense:
- Test environments (used sporadically)
- Servers supporting periodic business cycles like submitting forecasts or month-end reporting - add servers during peak periods
- Terminal servers for client deployment
Problems with cloud or hosted solution:
- Where is your data? For reporting, you better have a damn fast pipe into the database server for reporting if it's not co-located with Cognos
- Authentication - how will you manage security
- Connection into internal network - do you need to see other internal resources
Cloud tends to be only cheaper if you have high variability in demand (i.e. you can turn servers off for measurable periods of time), and little internal technical support.
You also need to make sure what the guaranteed availability is like. If it's 95%, that means you could be without a Cognos solution for 5% of the time while the cloud servers are offline.
MF.