There are many challenges that business owners face when it comes to keeping their data secure. In a constantly changing digital landscape, businesses need to constantly stay on top of how adequate their IoT networks, applications, and BI software are holding up against new and evolving security threats.
In this guide, we’ll be looking at the basic security features that should be included in BI software, so business owners don’t have to worry about compromising their valuable data. We’ll also take a look at what DashboardFox is doing to ensure a safer platform.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
The Basic Levels of Security for BI Software
In more traditional forms, business intelligence security involves implementation only at the report level.
Not quite sure what that means? Here’s an example: Imagine you have around twenty or so user groups for a particular data set. For report level security, a business’s BI team would generate twenty reports with personalized restrictions that are based on individual user profiles.
This is quite outdated and not as valuable in terms of modern-day BI security. In fact, it’s really bad for productivity and is very time-consuming. Imagine having to go back and constantly modify individual reports.
Modern BI software should feature, at the very least, these five attributes outside of reporting-level protection:
Multi-level security processes.
Reduced operational and maintenance costs.
Better product performance.
More flexibility.
Data governance and consistent auditing.
Security isn’t just about the secure part-- BI software needs to be both secure and benefit the business financially, operationally, and performance-wise.
DashboardFox can do all of this and more.
How DashboardFox’s Four Levels of Security Work
Let’s break down how DashboardFox approaches security in its products.
1. Authentication
We focus on secured users (meaning users that have a login and a password to access DashboardFox) and non-secured users (those without login access, or “guest viewers.”) Guest viewers can view any report that you assign a public view license to.
A majority of your users will likely be secured users. Guest viewers are highly beneficial if you want to share data with an audience or stakeholder, or want to share a small report with someone and you're not particularly worried about security. It's all about providing the right amount of access control.
With secured users, DashboardFox maintains a complete audit log of all the activities they do. When they log in (if they have a lot of failed login attempts), when they create, edit, delete, or run reports. We even track when they print or export data. With this level of audit data, the business can have complete visibility on usage and BI adoption, but also on security concerns.
2. Access
Not every secured user can run amuck on your platform, which is why access control is a valuable asset within DashboardFox.
DashboardFox allows you to connect multiple databases and data sources together within a single platform. But not every user needs access to them all.
With Access control, you determined who has the ability to even see the dashboards and reports built for specific data sources. And you have the ability to control which specific reports, dashboards and folders they can see, assuming they have access to that data source.
3. Role-Based
Role-based access features two levels of security. When a person receives access to the app, they can be granted three initial access points-- view-only, composer, and app builder.
The second level is report-level security. This involves providing additional access points to approved users, such as the ability to view, modify, or delete reports.
With role-based security you control who can do what and to what. It adds a tremendous amount of flexibility to meet even the most unique security requirements.
4. Data-Level
Data-level security is where users can actually see information and data that they are allowed to see. Some refer to this as field level security. In DashboardFox, we actually have row-level or field-level security and column-level security. You can control not only what data they can see, but also if they can see it at all.
Let’s look at an example. A marketing team may have the ability to see information on an enterprise-wide level, but a lower-level marketing specialist (i.e. not a manager) can only see data on a department level, rather than all of the data as a whole.
Data level security can be easily configured and users will be able to view the same dashboards and reports that they need to, all with necessary data limits to ensure company-wide security.
The Benefits of DashboardFox Security
The above configuration may seem like a lot, but we promise the learning curve is not too complex. In fact, most of your admin limitations and user authentication preferences can be set up very quickly. It’s a simple step-by-step process, and we’ve created some videos and tutorials for getting started with security configurations and access for simple or multi-department environments.
When DashboardFox was first conceived, we wanted to design an application that is as secure as possible. This isn’t possible with just reporting level security.
If we were going to ensure that our users could access their data as easily as possible, we naturally had to make the process extremely secure.
We also understand that not every BI use case needs to have extremely intensive security-- so small teams can use DashboardFox with reporting level security if needed.
You simply get the best of both worlds!
When it comes down to it, a well-rounded security framework is absolutely necessary when it comes to BI software, and DashboardFox has it all.
Contact us today to request a demo and see exactly what you’re missing out on with DashboardFox.