Shadow BI is nothing but BI applications developed by non BI professionals. It usually comes into practice when a business user loses patience in an incumbent software solution and comes up with a solution of his/her own. Shadow BI applications might appear as user friendly and appealing but most likely it might do some damage to the organization in the long run. There has been a debate as to whether shadow BI must be removed or not. Some experts believe when shadow BI becomes successful it will contribute to the BI ecosphere. Constructive professional guidance will be required to make the solution sustainable. Sometimes, it can even lead to better alternative solutions. However, there are some risks associated. The organization might be exposed to risks if the software has poor functionality, data integrity and might run into legal issues if it violates the software license agreement. Read more at: http://www.dataversity.net/how-to-overcome-the-big-data-hoarding-monster/

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665

As industry experts suggest, PaaS solutions can make things easier and accelerate the drive towards business goals. It leads to the question that why they are not as popular as IaaS and SaaS? One has to explore the history of PaaS solutions to get the answer! PaaS, unlike IaaS and SaaS, is still relatively new and simply does not yet have the share of mind that other cloud technologies enjoy. It is also a fact that some initial PaaS offerings did not quite hit the mark, as they were too narrowly focused and not able to offer everything what organizations may have needed. PaaS solutions, particularly those developed within the open-source community, are highly modular and flexible while remaining very secure. This gives organizations the option to plug and play as necessary. PaaS solutions allow for simplified, yet powerful development, but this is where things can get a bit tricky. Too much flexibility could impede accelerated development, which is counterproductive.

Gordon Haff, from Cloud Product Strategy team, Red Hat, reveals more about PaaS in his recent article. To read, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/27/why-your-company-shouldnt-pass-on-paas-to-develop-new-apps/