Business intelligence Question:

Cubes allow to store larges amounts (usually track history) of data and get very good performance. Security is very detailed and it can be applied on "member level" which is an individual value in a column. Cubes usually track history so user get access to "point in time" data and accurate data. My favorite example is top 1 customer that moves its location from London to Bristol with cubes (or more data warehouses) historic data will not move to Bristol and it will remain in London which is very often not the case in providing reporting information from operational systems.