How Fast Will it Take BI to Move Outside the Firewall to the Cloud?

Not sure if the "cloud" needs to be outside of the firewall, and it all depends on what information and enterprise environment you're talking about.


In general "Cloud" based reporting and management of enterprise business intelligence offers significant advantages - consistency of formatting and reporting, more consistent analysis, ability to better integrate distributed enterprise operations, etc. (e.g., Consider a worldwide enterprise supply chain management environment.)
The issue is going to be security, but we're assuming that the "cloud" is hosted by some third-party centralized utility. A hybrid envrionment of intra and inter enterprise environments, some behind the "firewall" and some external depending on the requirements will be the more likely scenario.