Most of us have moved our web and e-commerce operations to the cloud, but we are still getting sales reports and other information we need to run our business long after the fact. We sell a hamburger on Tuesday, you might say, but don’t know if we made money selling it until Friday. That’s because we still rely on Batch processing, where we generate orders, reports, and other management-useful pieces of data when it’s most convenient for the IT department to process them, rather than in real time. That was fine when horse-drawn wagons made our deliveries, but it is far too slow for today’s world, where stock prices and other bits of information circle the world (literally) at the speed of light. It’s time to move to In-Stream Processing. You can’t – and shouldn’t – keep putting it off.