We are happy to announce that Syncfusion^® has been named a Representative Vendor of the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Embedded Analytics¹ for Bold BI, its analytics and business intelligence (ABI) solution. Gartner is a leading technology consulting and research company, relied on by businesses worldwide for tech guidance.

“Embedding analytics and data science functionalities within websites or business applications via APIs reduces change management and increases analytics adoption,” Gartner writes in the report. “These capabilities are enabling citizen developers, who may lack coding skills, to extend the reach and connectedness of how ABI is used.”

Bold BI is a true “analytics everywhere” application, designed from the ground up to live within an embedded environment. With an intuitive, interactive dashboard editor and a wide and growing variety of customizable widgets, Bold BI allows users to create visually rich analytic dashboards easily within their existing apps.

We’re pleased that Bold BI has been recognized by this report. In addition to the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Embedded Analytics, Syncfusion has been named in the following Gartner reports:

• 2022 Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology
• 2022 Hype Cycle for Analytics and Business Intelligence
• 2022 Hype Cycle for Finance Analytics
• 2022 Finance Technology Bullseye Report

For more information on the rich feature set provided by Bold BI^®, visit boldbi.com/features. To try Bold BI for yourself, free for 30 days, download the trial.

[1] Gartner, “Market Guide for Embedded Analytics” Anirudh Ganeshan, Julian Sun, Kevin Quinn, 14 February, 2023

Disclaimer

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Related resources

Bold BI v6.1 Release Highlights for Self-Hosting and Embedding [blog]

Syncfusion Receives 39 G2 Badges – This Winter [blog]

If you are new to Bold BI, we invite you to sign up for a free trial on our website.

This blog provides show notes for our July 23, 2020, webinar, “User-Based Data Access in Bold BI^® Dashboards.” The webinar is presented and hosted by Syncfusion^® developer Pravin Joshua D.

Introduction

To start off with, here is what you can do with Bold BI and user-based data access:

• Restrict data based on logged-in users. For example, you can create a dashboard that can be shared with multiple users, with each viewer accessing only the data they have permission to see.
• Reduce deployment time. Since you don’t have to create individual dashboards for each user, you save a lot of time.
• Assure fine-grained security. Row-level security helps to filter data for users and groups.
• Switch connections based on logged-in user for SQL Server connections. Useful when using separate databases.

Row-level security

Now let’s go into more detail about what we’re offering with one of these, row-level security:

• Filter data at the row level based on the user.
• Map users and column values directly using name or email identities.
• Auto-map from a permission table.
• Auto-map from a custom query.
• Impersonate users when designing the dashboard.

Dynamic connection string

When you have your data in different databases, or a different server for clients, it can be tough creating a dashboard for individual users. In Bold BI, you have the option to switch connection strings based on logged-in users:

• Use in both embedding and direct-use cases.
• Reuse the same dashboard for different users or clients.

Conclusion

We have taken a look at how you can create dashboards that can be used for multiple users and clients, avoiding the need for individual dashboards based on access. We hope you enjoyed this webinar and found a new way of optimizing dashboard creation and deployment time. 

Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Related links

• Bold BI
• Bold BI videos

At the end of September, Microsoft made its new cloud-based security software, Azure Sentinel, publicly available (GA). A security information and event management (SIEM) program, Sentinel collects data across an enterprise’s systems, cloud and enterprises, and analyzes it through machine learning and AI to detect and adaptively respond to any anomalies. It delivers security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise. Cybersecurity teams can investigate incidents or proactively hunt for security issues.

About Azure Sentinel

Azure Sentinel was in public preview from February, gathering input from 12,000 users. Some of its features are still in preview, such as its deep investigation tools designed to help security teams delve into the root cause of security threats. At the moment, though, users of this cloud-based SIEM can take advantage of the built-in security orchestration and automation for their common tasks.

The data Sentinel collects can be displayed in a dashboard in the program. For any Syncfusion Bold BI^® customers interested in pulling Sentinel data into their Bold BI dashboards, our developers tested Sentinel as a data source over the course of October. Bold BI and Sentinel are compatible, so the process should be seamless (and do let us know if it’s not).

Azure Sentinel, as must be expected, is integrated with Microsoft’s other Azure services, like Active Directory, Security Center, and Cloud App Security. It also continues to increase its connectors to third parties like Symantec and Cisco.

Pricing and Downloads

Microsoft has several pricing plans for Azure Sentinel but starts off at $2.46/GB of analyzed data in the pay-as-you-go plan. If you have Azure Monitor Log Analytics, you can download a free trial for a month. For cybersecurity teams already working to protect data in Azure, Sentinel seems to be a painless way to keep up with the latest in cloud-based SIEM security.

Conclusion

If you’ve given Sentinel a try, let us know in the comments section what you thought of it. Do you recommend it? If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

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Recently announced by its founders, the new Confidential Computing Consortium will be hosted by The Linux Foundation. Members like Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and Baidu, among others, have come together to collaborate on technology and standards for confidential computing.

The Problem

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, it can be a legal minefield for one company to share data with another company. One of the major concerns is security, both for the specifics of a company’s operations and for its customers’ personal information. These concerns mean that businesses are not receiving insights into their fields that could be gained from pooling data.

The Solution

The solution to this is confidential computing. Confidential computing is about protecting data in use. Companies can pool their data sets and run them through algorithms. Then, they can find the useful patterns they contain, but without actually seeing the data itself. That data is encrypted at every stage.

Tech companies big and small recognize both the importance of this solution, and that the technology to implement it is scattered and hard to bring together workably. Thus was born the Confidential Computing Consortium.

The Confidential Computing Consortium

The Consortium has a mission “of creating technology, taxonomy, and cross-platform development tools for confidential computing. This will allow application and systems developers to create software that can be deployed across different public clouds and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) architectures.”

Each member company is contributing open-source technologies and collaborating on standards useful to their mission. Microsoft is offering its Open Enclave SDK, Red Hat its Enarx, Intel its Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGE).

In addition, Consortium members will work on more open-source tools “that provide the right environment for TEE development.” They’ll also lead industry outreach and education programs. See The Linux Foundation’s press release for more information and quotes from participating members.

Benefiting Our People

Data security is important, and we’ll be interested to see what comes of this alliance. A lot of our customers will directly benefit from a more secure way of keeping their data private in the stages before it comes to our Bold BI^® platform to be rendered presentably. We hope it’ll allow more businesses to take advantage of big data technology to gain industry-wide insights.

If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

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Creating a data-sharing standard

As evidenced by frequent lawsuits these days, data sharing can be a tricky process for companies to engage in lawfully. Even when it’s for purposes that won’t be made public or used for marketing, hashing out the terms of use for data sharing can take far too much time and work.

Microsoft has recently announced a plan to change that. Desiring a way to standardize the process and terms, Microsoft has published rough drafts of three data-sharing agreements for open use by organizations under Creative Commons licenses. These drafts cover specific data-sharing scenarios and are open for the next few months to feedback from the public.

The idea of pre-written agreements isn’t exactly novel, but Microsoft feels they can do better than what already exists. Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel Erich Andersen said that they find it particularly valuable to have terms in place for using data purely for AI-training purposes. They apparently found existing resources lacking in this regard, as two of the three agreement proposals they’ve published involve AI training.

The proposed agreements

The three currently published agreement proposals are:

Open Use of Data Agreement (O-UDA): As the title says, the data sharing with this proposal comes with very few restrictions, just requiring those using it to pass on source and disclaimer information if the data is redistributed. This is an open data license for data with no personal information or ownership issues.

Computational Use of Data Agreement (C-UDA): This proposal specifies the use of the data shared, allowing “the data holder to make data available to anyone for computational use purposes, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and text and data mining,” according to the agreement’s overview (PDF).

Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development (DUA-OAI): This template even more specifically targets the use of data for training AI. The data itself is confidential, but the resulting AI model and code would be open source.

Open data for open innovation

Purposes for sharing data among organizations vary greatly, so these templates have limited scope. But Microsoft is planning to publish more as a contribution to the Open Data Initiative (ODI). The ODI was announced a year ago as a collaborative mission among Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP to improve customer experiences through optimizing their use of data. In fact, the mission statements of the ODI and these new templates have the same ring to them.

Microsoft cites Answer ALS as a primary example of why data sharing is important. Microsoft has invested $1 million in this project, creating support for Azure in the code of the biomedical research platform Galaxy, and cloud space for the billions of data points being collected from participants by the nonprofit. When the data set is complete, Microsoft will run it through AI analysis. They’ll then make both data and insights completely available to the researchers around the world trying to develop therapies and, they hope, a cure.

These and future proposed agreements could be a nice step toward quicker, smoother data sharing for nonprofits and commercial enterprises. What do you think of these proposals? What sort of agreements should Microsoft work on standardizing next? Let us know in the comments section, or on Facebook or X (formerly Twitter). Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

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