An Overview on the Structure and Applications for Business Intelligence and Data Mining in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a new computational paradigm which has attracted a lot of interest within the business and research community. Its objective is to integrate a wide amount of heterogeneous resources in an online way to provide services under demand to different types of users, which are liberated from the details of the inner infrastructure, just concentrating on their request of resources over the net. Its main features include an elastic resource configuration and therefore a suitable framework for addressing scalability in an optimal way. From the different scenarios in which Cloud Computing could be applied, its use in Business Intelligence and Data Mining in enterprises delivers the highest expectations. The main aim is to extract knowledge of the current working of the business, and therefore to be able to anticipate certain critical operations, such as those based on sales data, fraud detection or the analysis of the clients' behavior. In this work, we give an overview of the current state of the structure of Cloud Computing for applications on Business Intelligence and Data Mining. We provide details of the layers that are needed to develop such a system in different levels of abstraction, that is, from the underlying hardware platforms to the software resources available to implement the applications. Finally, we present some examples of approaches from the field of Data Mining that had been migrated to the Cloud Computing paradigm.