Until a few years ago, accessing, modeling, visualizing, and reporting the information required by businesses would have been out of the reach of all but the large corporates.
Today, cloud technologies have driven down the costs of implementing BI solutions making them much more accessible for small to medium sized businesses. Specifically, Microsoft’s powerful self-service BI tool, Power BI, allows every business to explore enterprise-grade analytics and decision support for zero upfront cost.
Of course, implementation will vary based on deployment choices, audience mix and visualization requirements. While some vendors provide transparent pricing, others don’t, so you’ll need to take that into consideration. Before you research vendors, it is key to know what your specific budget and requirements are for BI software.
Consider this: On average, the ROI for organisations who leverage Dynamics 365, for every dollar spent is $16.97 in returns.*

Data security and availability are key requirements for any IT system. A BI solution should match the same high levels of performance, reliability, and security that you expect of the other systems in your organisation. Reputable BI solutions leverage existing security infrastructures to keep data safe.
As an example, the Power BI service is built on Azure , Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure and platform. Power BI uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) to manage user identity and permissions, and supports Row-Level Security to automatically restrict data access for given users based on role.

While you may have multiple line-of-business systems that you use to manage your business, BI is about combining data from these sources in a structured manner to visually present information in a meaningful way. This is not possible from conventional standalone reporting tools.
A truly useful BI solution should easily connect to your day to day business applications.
Having the right information to make the right decisions at the right time is a simple concept, but making it happen can be a challenge. There’s a substantial amount of data to be mined in every business situation, whether directly from an application, from spreadsheets or even document-based. 
A BI solution can aggregate data from all of these sources and more, and provide insights and meaningful information in a single dashboard. Think of a BI Solution as complementary to your existing reporting investments