What is a Cloud-Agnostic platform?

The term agnostic doesn’t just apply to religion. It’s a computing term that applies to vendor-neutral products. What does that mean exactly? A piece of hardware or software can be used with a particular type of product, no matter the supplier.

In the cloud world, it means that a piece of hardware or software is interoperable with a range of different cloud suites like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Why cloud-agnostic components are essential for business

According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2021 report, 76% of enterprises reported working with multiple public clouds.

In using multiple different public cloud offerings, businesses need a way to work across these products made by other companies.

That’s why cloud-agnostic components are necessary. You want to be able to plug in software and have it just work - whether you’re connected to Azure or AWS data stores.

Cloud agnostic vs Cloud-native

Cloud-agnostic is a term that you’re less likely to come across than cloud-native. Cloud-native means that a service or product is built to run in the cloud and takes advantage of specific cloud tools and architectures. It’s software built with a cloud-first approach.

Cloud-agnostic software can also be cloud-native - although many cloud-native software products, such as Power BI, only work with a specific cloud provider.

The benefits of cloud-agnostic computing

  • Avoid vendor lock-in across cloud services
  • Pick and choose more cost-effective cloud services from each provider
  • Take advantage of cloud platforms that offer unique services
  • Cloud-agnostic components are portable if you switch cloud provider

Cloud-agnostic Business Intelligence (BI) tools

Data sources

For Business Intelligence purposes, your data may be stored in all types of different repositories, potentially across multiple public, hybrid, and on-premises clouds. Working with this data where it lies, rather than reconfiguring or migrating it first, removes messy and time-consuming intermediary steps. Many of the more traditional BI platforms copy data around, which significantly affects performance.

As performance is paramount, bipp also uses native drivers specific to each database. In cases where a native driver is not available, bipp uses the industry-standard ODBC interface. We’ve even built our native drivers and open sourced them at times (such as to ensure highly performant processing.

Does cloud-agnostic mean something is truly interoperable with any cloud provider?

Cloud-agnostic is generally a misnomer. When companies talk about their product being cloud-agnostic, it can be used with the major cloud providers or specific comparable services across various providers.

Is bipp cloud-agnostic?

bipp’s BI platform is proudly cloud-agnostic.

To know more about bipp’s cloud agnostic approach…

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