Get to Know Tableau Cloud

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe the benefits of Tableau Cloud.
Define the Tableau Cloud operating model.
Describe the pace of innovation for Tableau Cloud products.
List three key reasons for choosing Tableau Cloud over Tableau Server.

What Is Tableau Cloud?

Tableau is a superior analytics platform that users love. But which Tableau deployment option is best for your analytics needs–Server or Cloud? Like Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud is an enterprise-scale analytics tool for business users and analysts. Unlike Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud is a fully hosted and cloud-based SaaS solution.

A move from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud simplifies the administration of on-premises or private cloud hardware. It uses the Salesforce Hyperforce infrastructure to give you a highly available, flexible, and fast platform that’s accessible from anywhere. With Tableau Cloud, your organization always has access to the latest features and updates without the need for manual upgrades, freeing up your admin team to focus on other priorities.

Let’s review three primary benefits.

Ease of management: Looking for a less labor-intensive Tableau admin experience? Tired of upgrading your Tableau Server, only to be out of date a few months later? No longer interested in managing physical or virtual server hardware? Looking to provide analytics access to your global workforce? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, Tableau Cloud is for you!
Innovation: As the analytics market continues toward SaaS, Tableau Cloud is at the forefront of Tableau’s analytics experience and AI innovations, and always has the latest Tableau developments.
Cost: Tableau Cloud is a SaaS model, meaning we manage the hardware and administrative hosting costs for you, lowering the total cost of your Tableau Cloud deployments compared to Tableau Server.

Sounds great, right? Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of Tableau Cloud and why Tableau Server users might consider a switch to Tableau Cloud.

Tableau Cloud Operating Model

With Tableau Cloud, you don’t need to worry about how upgrading your software, expanding use cases, adding users, or scaling globally affects performance or security.

Tableau and Salesforce take care of upgrades, scale, and security.

Upgrades

Tableau and Salesforce manage version upgrades to keep you on the latest version with updated features and functionality. These upgrades are often carried out without any downtime, ensuring no disruption to service. Upgrades occur three times a year.

Scale

We designed Tableau Cloud to scale AI-powered analytics worldwide. It operates as a global, multitenant SaaS service hosted on AWS’s public cloud, with a presence in major regions (such as the US, UK, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia). Each AWS region includes multiple point of delivery (POD) locations, using a three-layer architecture (front end, middle tier, and back end).

To ensure reliability, we built Tableau Cloud with an active-active-active architecture, providing high availability across multiple availability zones. What does all this mean? Tableau Cloud is everywhere the internet is, and we work hard to keep all Tableau Cloud pods and deployments ready to go.

Security

Tableau Cloud offers secure, encrypted data management designed to meet compliance standards such as HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO, and GDPR. For more information on compliance, review our compliance certifications and attestations.

Migrating to Tableau Cloud allows organizations to rely on a trusted provider, Salesforce, to handle security and compliance requirements. With built-in security measures and regular audit reports, you can have confidence that your data is well-protected in transit and at rest. With that being said, defining and monitoring the data that’s uploaded to Tableau Cloud and who can access it are still your responsibility as the customer.

Shared Responsibility Model diagram showing responsibility between yourself, Tableau, and Amazon Web Services.

Innovation

When you’re on Tableau Cloud, you can be sure that you’re operating on the latest version and have access to all of our innovations, including generative AI. Generative AI has recently gained significant attention, but Tableau has been incorporating AI into its platform for years. While AI remains a fundamental part of Tableau’s functionality across the platform, generative AI features like Tableau Pulse and Tableau Agent are currently available exclusively in Tableau Cloud.

Tableau Pulse

Tableau Pulse makes analytics more personalized, contextual, and intelligent. Users follow metrics and insights tailored to their work, helping them uncover leading indicators, address potential issues early, and make more informed decisions. To simplify accessing, sharing, and collaborating on data, Tableau Pulse integrates seamlessly into everyday workflows, including in Tableau Mobile, Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams. This ensures users receive relevant and reliable information at the right time, so they can make timely, data-driven decisions.

With generative AI built into the experience, Tableau Pulse enhances how insights are identified and shared. It automatically detects key patterns, summarizes data, and supports on-demand exploration, helping your organization’s analytics run more efficiently. Take a look at this short demo.

Tableau Agent

Tableau Agent is an AI-powered assistant built directly into Tableau and designed to simplify your workflow. With Tableau Agent you can interact with your data using natural language, create visualizations based on best practices, write calculations, generate data source field descriptions, and access in-context guidance. Think of it this way: Tableau Agent takes care of your routine data visualization tasks and frees you up to focus on what matters most–the strategic decisions that influence impact for your organization.

Cost

Because Tableau and Salesforce take care of the infrastructure, uptime, and upgrades, when you switch your Tableau Server deployments to Tableau Cloud, you reduce the hardware and hosting costs associated with Tableau Server. This allows your team to shift focus to high-value initiatives like fostering a data-driven culture.

In fact, according to research from a third-party firm, Tableau deployments that migrated from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud experienced cost savings ranging from 13% to 37%. These savings result from reducing infrastructure requirements and the time and effort needed to manage and maintain Tableau deployments—efforts that can be especially resource-intensive for larger organizations.

Chart showing cost of ownership goes down due to less maintenance in Tableau Cloud.

Reasons You Might Not Choose Tableau Cloud

There are still some scenarios where Tableau Cloud might not be the right fit for your organization. Some of those include:

Particular regulation and data residency requirements
Unsupported data sources
Site capacity needs
Specific authentication systems

As you consider a move to Tableau Cloud, be sure to evaluate all of the technical considerations detailed in the help documentation Technical Considerations for Migrating from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud. And get a quick summary of when a migration to Tableau Cloud does and doesn’t make sense in this video.

Let’s Recap

You’ve learned about the benefits of migrating to Tableau Cloud, and you probably now have a good idea of whether Tableau Cloud is the right analytics choice for your organization. In the next unit, you learn about data migration strategies.

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