Business Intelligence: Beyond Dashboards and Charts
The term “business intelligence” (BI) tends to elicit visions of dashboards with red, yellow, and green indicators representing targets met (or not) or perhaps various types of charts and graphs. But the potential of BI can be much more interesting and significant in what it can help organizations accomplish. To illustrate this point, you can read about one fascinating example that explains how Microsoft is using its own tools to protect Internet users.
Attacking an Army of Zombies
BI isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of fighting cybercrime, but BI plays a crucial role in Microsoft’s new Cybercrime Center. If you like a good detective story, you’ll enjoy reading how Microsoft is working with “a seasoned team of investigators…trying to stay a move or two ahead of the world’s most odious Internet criminals in an effort to make the web a safer place.” And they’re using Microsoft BI tools to get there.
Microsoft BI enables the investigators to do things like view a map that lights up locations where cybercrime is occurring, or to predict where the next outbreak might take place:
“… in the forensics laboratory, Donal Keating – a bearded Irishman, purveyor of snappy one-liners and senior manager of forensics – talks about a recent call from one of Microsoft’s partners, a hardware manufacturer. A shipment of 3,600 of the partner’s laptops had been stolen, and they wondered if Keating could help. Each laptop had a unique activation code, and within ten minutes Keating had produced a map. In the lab he runs it in speeding time-lapse, and over the course of a few days, the map lights up with where each of the thousands of laptops had come online.”
As Microsoft president Brad Smith notes, “[T]he new Cybercrime Center, is the perfect mixture of people, tools and technology…. Plus it’s a real-life showcase for what Microsoft’s business intelligence and big data tools can do.”
Read the story, “Digital Detectives,” here to learn more about this “world-class command center for a team at the forefront of global internet security.”
BI Leadership
Examples like the Cybercrime Center demonstrate the innovative and important ways that BI can make a difference in the world and in organizations of all types. But in addition, you can check out objective evaluations of Microsoft’s BI platform to see how it compares with other solutions in the industry.
This is one proof point demonstrating that customers appreciate Microsoft’s clear roadmap for the elements that comprise its data platform, which integrates SQL Server, SharePoint, Excel, Power BI and the Microsoft Azure cloud. This integration with existing and familiar tools assures that everyone in an organization can gain insights from data, and IT has the tools to enable Microsoft’s secure and managed BI and analytics solution. In addition, this integration extends to the cloud, making it possible to extend your on-premises solution into the future. Click here to learn more about Microsoft BI and analytics.
Register for the Webinar
You can learn more about Microsoft BI by attending the upcoming free webinar, “Tackle the Top Five Data Challenges with SQL Server,” which you can attend live on Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 10:00-10:45AM PST (GMT -7). You’ll learn how the Microsoft data platform’s unified approach can give you a comprehensive way to address the top five data management challenges.
Join speakers, Ramnik Gulati , Director of Product Marketing, Data Platform & IoT Marketing and David Hobbs-Mallyon, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud + Enterprise Integrated Marketing, for the first in a series of free 30-minute webinars, “Tackle the top five data challenges with Microsoft SQL Server”, on Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 10:00-10:45AM PST (GMT -7). Register here today.
