In 2015 MicroStrategy made their Secure Cloud offering generally available. And I have been working on this for the past one year. I find this new offering from MicroStrategy particularly fascinating. I have already done a blog post on the different components of MicroStrategy Secure Cloud and in this one I will try to discuss pros and cons of the same.
1> Up and Running Very Fast- One of the major worries which organizations face with an on-premise MicroStrategy installation is the various different activities you would need to perform before you have your BI environment available for development. This includes activities such as capacity planning, procurement / provisioning of BI servers, installation of the MicroStrategy software in the BI servers etc. Many of the organizations fret over the prospect of implementing MicroStrategy because of the huge upfront cost which is involved.
MicroStrategy Secure Cloud provides an easy to deploy alternative available within just hours after signing off the contract. Within hours of signing the contract MicroStrategy would provide details of the environment provisioned.
2> Low maintenance cost – An on-premise comes with a recurring cost of maintaining the infrastructure. There is the cost of maintaining the hardware infrastructure in company’s data centre. This is followed by the additional cost of having administrators and support professionals who will be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the environment. In case of any crashes or system unavailability advice needs to be sought from additional experts and a lot of coordination activities need to be performed.
With MicroStrategy Secure Cloud all this is packaged as part of the deal. It is the entire responsibility of MicroStrategy monitor, support and maintain the environment. They generate periodic performance reports from the environment and flag any risks due to over utilization or non-performance. In case of crashes the entire coordination onus lies with MicroStrategy so for business there is only one point to follow up.
3> Scalable and highly available – An AWS based environment ensures that the platform is infinitely scalable. Thus with time as the environment grows additional memory and computing power can be added to the platform to cater the growing needs. Thus, as for an on-premise environment, organizations need not perform an elaborate capacity planning exercise and be always worried if the application sees an exponential rise in adoption. Making use of AWS infrastructure also ensure failures are rare and even in case of a failure, as mentioned in above point, the entire monitoring is undertaken by MicroStrategy who ensure system availability in close coordination with AWS.
4> CSM and MSTR Tech Support – With every Cloud installation MicroStrategy assigns a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to the organization. CSM is the single point of contact and escalation point for any type of issues / requests related to the cloud environment. CSM advices the customer on different ways to make the Secure Cloud deployment a success. Along with CSM there is the usual MicroStrategy Tech Support to answer any technical issues faced.
5> Version Upgrades - With MicroStrategy planning to release a major version of the tool every quarter, upgrading the software is going to be crucial. Gone are the days when you could be on the same version for years and then go for a big-bang upgrade. Now since the releases would be coming up quickly, the support for the older versions would be phased out soon as well. Thus organizations would need to be agile with their upgrade planning as well.For upgrade on the Secure Cloud the entire activity is taken care by MicroStrategy themselves apart from the regression testing. For minor releases they would do an in-place upgrade. And for major releases they would provision a parallel environment in the upgraded version where once the regression is completing, in-place upgrade would be performed of existing environment. Again there is nothing rigid in the approach and mostly discussion with CSM helps to sort out the upgrade approach and plan.
Organizations would have a very concise view of the Total Cost of Ownership for the BI application as they have a clear view of what they are paying for. For a traditional on-premise installation there are direct and in-direct costs involved. But in a Secure Cloud installation it is only the money organization is paying to MicroStrategy.
Secure Cloud is still evolving as a platform. For example one of the drawbacks which I had experienced was that there was a need to raise Tech Support cases for very simple requests like reboot of I Server or Web Server. Now these are very simple tasks which, at least for non-production environment, can be undertaken by customer IT only. Now MicroStrategy has come up with a protocol because of which there is no longer a need to reach out Tech Support for such simple requests.
Then the other drawback which I experienced was the way they allow connectivity to be established to the utility box. For this MicroStrategy has mandated the use of RD Gateway but there are certain limitations related to compatibility of RD Gateway with Windows 7. There are certain patches which needs to be available on Windows 7 and certain patches which should not be there on Windows 7 for the RD Gateway connectivity to work. On Windows 10 the connectivity is expected to work seamlessly.
Then there is the problem of the VPN tunnel between MicroStrategy Cloud I Server and on-premise database server getting closed if there is a long period of inactivity. This again not a desirable feature though a simple workaround is to have a ping script periodically ping the I Server from the on-premise server.
These are few hiccups which are expected to get ironed with time. But once these issues are resolved what will come up is a robust cloud offering which can help MicroStrategy extend its reach to emerging markets. Currently the license cost of MicroStrategy is too high to make in-roads into the emerging markets category; Secure Cloud may help to bridge that gap.
(Image Source: www.microstrategy.com)
MicroStrategy Secure Cloud provides an easy to deploy alternative available within just hours after signing off the contract. Within hours of signing the contract MicroStrategy would provide details of the environment provisioned.
2> Low maintenance cost – An on-premise comes with a recurring cost of maintaining the infrastructure. There is the cost of maintaining the hardware infrastructure in company’s data centre. This is followed by the additional cost of having administrators and support professionals who will be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the environment. In case of any crashes or system unavailability advice needs to be sought from additional experts and a lot of coordination activities need to be performed.
With MicroStrategy Secure Cloud all this is packaged as part of the deal. It is the entire responsibility of MicroStrategy monitor, support and maintain the environment. They generate periodic performance reports from the environment and flag any risks due to over utilization or non-performance. In case of crashes the entire coordination onus lies with MicroStrategy so for business there is only one point to follow up.
3> Scalable and highly available – An AWS based environment ensures that the platform is infinitely scalable. Thus with time as the environment grows additional memory and computing power can be added to the platform to cater the growing needs. Thus, as for an on-premise environment, organizations need not perform an elaborate capacity planning exercise and be always worried if the application sees an exponential rise in adoption. Making use of AWS infrastructure also ensure failures are rare and even in case of a failure, as mentioned in above point, the entire monitoring is undertaken by MicroStrategy who ensure system availability in close coordination with AWS.
4> CSM and MSTR Tech Support – With every Cloud installation MicroStrategy assigns a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to the organization. CSM is the single point of contact and escalation point for any type of issues / requests related to the cloud environment. CSM advices the customer on different ways to make the Secure Cloud deployment a success. Along with CSM there is the usual MicroStrategy Tech Support to answer any technical issues faced.
5> Version Upgrades - With MicroStrategy planning to release a major version of the tool every quarter, upgrading the software is going to be crucial. Gone are the days when you could be on the same version for years and then go for a big-bang upgrade. Now since the releases would be coming up quickly, the support for the older versions would be phased out soon as well. Thus organizations would need to be agile with their upgrade planning as well.For upgrade on the Secure Cloud the entire activity is taken care by MicroStrategy themselves apart from the regression testing. For minor releases they would do an in-place upgrade. And for major releases they would provision a parallel environment in the upgraded version where once the regression is completing, in-place upgrade would be performed of existing environment. Again there is nothing rigid in the approach and mostly discussion with CSM helps to sort out the upgrade approach and plan.
Organizations would have a very concise view of the Total Cost of Ownership for the BI application as they have a clear view of what they are paying for. For a traditional on-premise installation there are direct and in-direct costs involved. But in a Secure Cloud installation it is only the money organization is paying to MicroStrategy.
Secure Cloud is still evolving as a platform. For example one of the drawbacks which I had experienced was that there was a need to raise Tech Support cases for very simple requests like reboot of I Server or Web Server. Now these are very simple tasks which, at least for non-production environment, can be undertaken by customer IT only. Now MicroStrategy has come up with a protocol because of which there is no longer a need to reach out Tech Support for such simple requests.
Then the other drawback which I experienced was the way they allow connectivity to be established to the utility box. For this MicroStrategy has mandated the use of RD Gateway but there are certain limitations related to compatibility of RD Gateway with Windows 7. There are certain patches which needs to be available on Windows 7 and certain patches which should not be there on Windows 7 for the RD Gateway connectivity to work. On Windows 10 the connectivity is expected to work seamlessly.
Then there is the problem of the VPN tunnel between MicroStrategy Cloud I Server and on-premise database server getting closed if there is a long period of inactivity. This again not a desirable feature though a simple workaround is to have a ping script periodically ping the I Server from the on-premise server.
These are few hiccups which are expected to get ironed with time. But once these issues are resolved what will come up is a robust cloud offering which can help MicroStrategy extend its reach to emerging markets. Currently the license cost of MicroStrategy is too high to make in-roads into the emerging markets category; Secure Cloud may help to bridge that gap.
(Image Source: www.microstrategy.com)