Reporting with SSRS in Multitenant Cloud Environment

As Increasing number of companies started to move towards cloud computing,  Most of the market leaders rushed to deliver cloud based software products to the market. Multitenancy is the key to become successful in the cloud based product business .

There are two areas become more of concern for the cloud based product providers and consumers . They are Reporting and Integration with other products.  Most of the existing reporting products are unusable in cloud or tied to their own cloud platforms. It is unwise to create reporting framework for each product from scratch. Generally challenges associated with Cloud Reporting are

1. Database sits in remote location and connectivity will be the issue.
2. ODBC and OLEDB based access from client network might have been restricted due to safety issues.
3. Most of the applications are multitenant application. Often tenants share the same database server with other tenants. Each tenants should be restricted to view the data of other tenants.
4. Need a 3-Tier or n-Tier architecture for Report Designing, Report Rendering and other functionalities such as scheduling.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting server is one of the time tested product in Reporting.  It works well with .NET based products. Immediate choice for the Microsoft technology based companies would be SQL Server Reporting Server. There are several advantages with SQL Server Reporting Services.

1. SSRS has full fledged reporting capabilities.(Tops in Gartner Report).
2. Comes free with SQL Server.
3. Three Tier Architecture.
4. Customizable
5. Load balance support
6. SSL support.
7. Provides C# based programmatic access.
8. Microsoft technology - Works well with .NET and SQLServer.
9. Regular feature addition and good support.

 In the upcoming articles, Let's see how we can overcome the challenges of cloud and Multitenancy with SSRS and discuss about various options available.