Archive for June, 2019

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Power BI advanced analytics and AI

June 19th, 2019

There is a huge demand to get more insight from the data using AI and advanced analytics.
See how to use visuals in Power BI to get more insight from your data and how to use embedded AI features in Power BI.

Power BI is about helping our customers embrace a data culture, where every employee can make better decisions based on data. The growth of Power BI has been staggering – customers ingest more than 20PB of data to Power BI every month, lighting up over 30M reports and dashboards, and the Power BI service processes over 12M queries per hour.

Gartner named Microsoft a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms for 12 consecutive years.
Power BI has led the way in infusing AI with BI through capabilities like Quick Insights which help unearth trends in data and Q&A which enable business users to get answers by simply asking questions.

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure Cognitive Services and Azure ML dataflows integration, to provide analysts with a toolkit of powerful AI functions:

● Azure Cognitive Services are sophisticated pre-trained machine learning models for intelligent applications. Analysts can use these models to extract insights from images by detecting objects. Text fields like customer feedback can be analyzed for positive and negative sentiment as well as have key phrases extracted. All these AI enrichments can be easily consumed by end users through interactive Power BI reports.

● Azure Machine Learning is a powerful platform where data scientists can develop machine learning models. These models can now easily be shared and used by analysts. Power BI automatically discovers which models an analyst has permissions to and provides an intuitive point and click user interface to invoke them. Analysts can now easily collaborate with data scientists as well as visualize and use insights from the model in their reports.

Learn more about the general availability for cognitive services, Azure ML and the AI workload in Power BI Premium.

Some exciting new capabilities that will be available soon:

● Two new AI visuals—Distribution Changes analyzes what makes a distribution look different, and the Decomposition Tree enables users to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric.

● Expanding Power BI’s vision and text analytics capabilities and adding entity detection and text and handwriting recognition, enabling one-click transformations for insights on unstructured data.

● For enterprises that need custom lifecycle management or further tuning, models created in Power BI can be exported to Azure ML

● Extending Power BI’s natural language capabilities. The new updates include the ability to train Q&A so it understands and adapts to company-specific language like synonyms, phrasings, or specific domains, and the ability for report authors to see every natural-language question asked so they can adjust how Power BI responds.

Template apps are integrated packages of pre-built Power BI dashboards and reports, configured to connect to specific data sources. With them, Microsoft partners can quickly provide analytics for the apps and services they provide. Partners can also manage the Template Apps development lifecycle, from dev to marketplace to updates. With template apps, users can immediately begin exploring, learning, and acting on key data with off-the-shelf apps. Today, Template Apps become generally available. Users can find and install template apps on AppSource.

Embedded analytics keeps evolving

With Power BI embedded analytics, you can extend the value of Power BI Premium and Power BI Pro. Embed analytics in internal websites, applications, and portals to empower your organization to make data-driven decisions. Here is some of the exciting news we are sharing today:

● Service principals with Power BI are now generally available. With service principal, application developers can authenticate an external application to embed Power BI content or manage and automate Power BI operations with Power BI using an app-only token. Read the full article.

● Use the AI-based ‘Key Influencers’ visualization in your application to allow end users to see which factors affect the metric being analyzed and contrast the relative importance of these factors.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management, Dynamics 365, Technology

Databases breaches

June 18th, 2019

Verizon has published a Data Breach Investigations Report annually and the latest report is the 11th edition, and all are extremely well detailed. Not all data breaches are discovered, and those that are discovered aren’t necessarily reported. The 2018 report covers 53,000 incidents, defined as: A security event that compromises the integrity, confidentiality or availability of an information asset. . It also covers 2,216 breaches, which are defined as: An incident that results in the confirmed disclosure — not just potential exposure — of data to an unauthorized party.

These numbers ), do NOT include breaches involving botnets. The additional 43,000 successful accesses via stolen credentials associated with botnets are handled in a special insights section of the report.

Those are scary numbers.

The Verizon report show s 73% perpetuated by outsiders, 28% involving internal actors, 2% involving partners, 2% featuring multiple parties, 50% carried out by organized criminal groups, 12% involved actors identified as nation-state or state-affiliated. These figures are regarding those confirmed data breaches, not all security incidents. While 28% involve internal users, the bulk of data breaches were caused by from people outside the organization, using malware or social attacks, or exploiting vulnerabilities created due to errors.

While the exact internal actors weren’t found for all of the reported data breaches, analysis was done for 277 data breaches and a screen shows: 72 system admin, 62 end user, 62 other, 32 doctor or nurse, 15 developer, 9 manager, 8 executives

Database administrators may focus on denying permissions to developers for production, but developers proved much less likely to be involved in data breaches than system admins …which includes … the DBAs.

You don’t need production system access to cause a data breach. It’s common practice in an enterprise to make copies of production data for use by analysts, developers, product managers, marketing professionals, and others.

Privacy law compliance makes this all the more concerning.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management, Security and Compliance, Technology

Biometrics – privacy and security concerns

June 18th, 2019

On Monday last week a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) subcontractor suffered a data breach that exposed the photos of tens of thousands of travelers coming in and out of the United States, through specific lanes at a single Port of Entry over a one and a half months period, in what was described as a “malicious cyber-attack.”

The database of traveler photos and license plate images was transferred to a CBP subcontractor’s network without the federal agency’s authorization or knowledge, the CBP explained. The subcontractor’s network was then hacked. BP said its own systems had not been compromised. Fortunately no other identifying information was included with the photos, and no passport or other travel document photos were compromised.

Images of airline passengers from the air entry and exit process were also not involved.

CBP’s “biometric entry-exit system,”is the government initiative to biometrically verify the identities of all travelers crossing US borders. which it is racing to implement so as to use facial recognition technology on “100 percent of all international passengers,” including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021.

The concern is whether that is urgency is ignoring vetting, and regulatory safeguards, and privacy legislation. Only last month, Perceptics, the maker of vehicle license plate readers used by the US government and cities to identify and track citizens, was hacked, and its files were dumped online. It is not clear whether the attacks were connected.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management, RFID biometric mobile, Security and Compliance, Technology

Summer discount on SQL protection tools

June 18th, 2019

Security, privacy, performance, and up time, all depend on a well maintained database with timely reports and alerts.
for an Enterprise system this is mission critical.
Few DBAs have the time and training to write and maintain a comprehensive set of scripts. Yet they also often lack the tools to do the job.
We offer fantastic suite of tools to help you to mange your SQL databases and with discounted bundled prices.
With privacy laws and compliance adding to the ever rising security threats, a well managed system is now often key to whether a customer will share data it you, and directly impacts whether you can secure and retain business.

Talk yo us about System health checks and administrator training, and how you can reduce administrative cost, and system risks with SQL management tools.
00971 43365589

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Posted in Security and Compliance, SQL, Technology

Microsoft showcases power Apps with AI at the Atlaata Business Application Summit

June 15th, 2019

Microsoft is in Atlanta is hosting its Business Application Summit where it is announcing three significant updates to its Power Platform to give users new tools and more advanced features.
– AI Building and PowerApps Portal,
– updated AI capabilities for PowerBI,
– enhanced cognitive/AI capabilities in Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft’s narrative is to democratize AI and ML f to eliminate the need for years of coding experience to properly utilize the technology in your application or at your company – ‘Citizen developers’.

Power BI’s new UI is more closely aligned to other Office 365 applications
• Text and image analytics in Power BI powered by Azure Cognitive Services, and the ability to invoke Azure ML models are now generally available.
• Microsoft announced two new AI visuals—Distribution Changes analyzes what makes a distribution look different, and the Decomposition Tree enables users to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric.
• Microsoft is expanding Power BI’s vision and text analytics capabilities, and aiso also adding entity detection and text and handwriting recognition, to enable one-click transformations for insights on unstructured data.
• For custom lifecycle management or further tuning, models created in Power BI can be exported to Azure ML.

The PowerApps Portal is a new tool that was previously in Dynamics 365 wall but is now available directly with PowerApps to enables customers to create websites that can be accessed by external users with a wide variety of identities, including personal accounts, LinkedIn, and other Azure Active Directory organizations, and enable anonymous access to content.

The Microsoft Flow, app will have AI capabilities and In conjunction with AI Builder, Flow users can extract data from images and text to drive logic in their processes to make more informed decisions.

Making AI more accessible in the power applications means that rather than have to model your application around an AI framework , AI and ML can be built around your application.

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Posted in Dynamics 365, Technology