Nearly one-third of companies view the cloud as business intelligence booster

Cloud computing is a technology that continues to impact the information technology industry on  a global scale. A recent study of nearly 1,400 IT managers from companies worldwide by Gartner indicated that many businesses are using the cloud to support their business intelligence capabilities.

According to the research, nearly one-third of those polled in the fourth quarter of 2011 said their organizations were using or planned to adopt the cloud for this purpose in the next 12 months.

"Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions," said Gartner research director James Richardson.

The study also found that nearly 20 percent of participants said their companies had replaced or plan to change their main business intelligence applications with cloud-based solutions.

Cloud computing offers several benefits for companies utilizing its functionality. Some key advantages include cloud-based email archiving solutions, which lessen the burden of storing electronic documents such as email, instant messages and other attachments. The systems offer unlimited storage capacity to lower computing costs, as well as real-time search options so employees can easily locate mission-critical data.