How BI makes SaaS products feel "safe" and "sensitive" (Part 1)

Once the SaaS model was launched, with its high cost performance, low maintenance cost, no need for software and hardware maintenance, and no need for operation and maintenance, it has achieved explosive growth, and even completely changed the software development model. The greetings of the bosses, I don't know when it started, have become: "Have you been on the cloud yet?".
Compared with traditional software projects, SaaS products reduce the development cost to an explosion. This model only takes 60+-30 days to achieve a full set of requirements, which has become the best choice for many enterprises.

However, everything has two sides. Surrounded by many advantages, SaaS also has shortcomings that are questioned by many people. One of the most important and most concerned by the public is "information security". Otherwise, there will be no "108,000 questions" about "SaaS" information security.

At present, the SaaS field has developed into the largest segment of cloud computing, and the demand for SaaS software is increasing in China. We can roughly classify SaaS services into general-purpose SaaS and vertical SaaS. General-purpose SaaS is applicable to the whole industry, mainly based on general management tools and technical tools, including instant messaging, collaborative OA, financial management, human resource management and other services. Vertical SaaS serves specific types of industry customers and provides software services that are more targeted and closer to customers' business needs.

With the rapid development of big data and cloud computing technology, "embedded analysis" has become a new value growth point of SaaS software. Based on the business data of SaaS platform, through "embedded" analysis tools, reports or data analysis functions are embedded into The SaaS platform is provided to users as a standard function of the platform. Users can not only design business reports and analysis boards by themselves, but also mine the value of data based on the business data in the SaaS platform to assist in business decision-making.

There are two main modes of data architecture of SaaS platform:

1. Multiple tenants share the same database, and the data of tenants is distinguished by the fields in the table;
2. Each tenant has its own independent database.

Different data structures have different data interface mechanisms when implementing the "embedded analysis" function. In terms of specific implementation, it needs to be designed according to the analysis scenario.
Based on the above data architecture, the general SaaS information security assurance mechanism is mainly dealt with from the following aspects:

1. Data security, ensure data security from physical policies, and establish a network security defense mechanism to prevent leakage of sensitive information due to application vulnerabilities or malicious privileged users, such as strong password protection, regular security data storage audits, program vulnerability scanning, etc.
2. Data separation. Multiple tenants share the same database, and the data of tenants is distinguished by the fields in the table. Therefore, a complete data isolation mechanism must be established to avoid serious economic losses caused by data leakage.
3. The security deployment of SaaS applications should first ensure the same security as physical machines, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems to strengthen their security.
4. Backup, establish a complete data backup service.
5. User rights and identity management, sound user rights management, in line with various complex organizational structure rights processing and ensure relevant security certification.

Data Insights in SaaS

We all know that SaaS products are often subdivided into specific user scenarios to solve the actual needs of users. Therefore, SaaS products know more about the application scenarios of users, and data analysis can be described as a "universal" demand, which seems to have become a Standard features of SaaS products. Then, for the manufacturers that provide SaaS products, if part of the main force is dispersed to solve the data analysis ability, it will inevitably lead to the lack of skills of the manufacturers. Therefore, in response to this important but non-professional demand, seeking existing mature tools is in line with the current situation. a feasible solution. When looking for such data analysis tools, it is no longer only in the traditional data analysis solution, but also in line with the SaaS development model.
SaaS software provides data analysis solutions, which need to include:

Self-service analytics capabilities available to business people

Self-service analysis is a prerequisite for embedding business intelligence and reporting functions into business systems. Thanks to the ease of use and technology independence of self-service analysis, even business personnel without software development and database knowledge can perform data analysis operations. . Moreover, existing BI tools can provide self-service analytics capabilities at all levels.

• Preview analysis. When viewing dashboards and reports, users can perform operations such as drilling, linkage, chart switching, field switching, filtering, sorting, and trend analysis.
• Design analysis, users with design permissions can create new dashboards and reports by themselves, and complete data analysis and exploration by themselves.
• With mobile analysis, users can not only keep abreast of the latest data changes on the mobile terminal, but also perform data analysis operations such as drilling and linkage.
• Data preparation, drag-and-drop data query designer, saves the process of writing SQL, and users can analyze Excel, database, Web interface and other data by themselves.
• Share and publish, the dashboards and reports you create can be directly shared with other users in the system, so that they can be published at any time.

OEM, white label and high customizability

Running in the business system in an embedded manner, we can carry out highly customized operations, from the installation package to the software running interface, so that it can be perfectly integrated with the business system interface and experience.

• Installation customization: Provide OEM customized installation package, silent installation and file copy distribution, which can be incorporated into the installation package of our software, or can be installed separately.
• System white label: The product logo, name and other information can be replaced, so that the entire product can show the image of the business system to the end user.
• Appearance style: including the login screen, main interface, mobile interface, etc., resources such as colors/pictures can be replaced to completely match the interface style of the business system.
• Extension plugins: Supports custom visualization plugin capabilities to integrate ECharts, G2, and D3 into the product to meet formatting needs.

All functions can run within the business system

All functions can run in the business system. At the same time, based on modular function encapsulation and attribute configuration, not only can the integration of functions be quickly realized, but also personalized integration configuration can be carried out through attributes.

• Document content integration, the dashboard and report content that have been designed can be integrated into the business system for users to perform operations such as analysis, printing and exporting.
• The document designer is integrated. After the business system is officially launched, users can directly create new dashboards and reports in the business system to quickly meet the new requirements after the system goes online.
• Data query integration, in addition to the built-in data sources/data sets of the business system, users can also connect to new data sources to meet the needs of more data analysis.
• Portal integration, the product's user portal and system management portal can also be directly embedded into the business system as the report center portal of the business system.
• Mobile APP integration, dashboards, reports, and portals can be directly integrated into mobile APPs to quickly provide a complete mobile analysis function module for the application system.

Connect and analyze all your data

BI analysis must provide an easy-to-use data query designer, which can quickly connect to various data, including local databases, cloud data, file data, web services, JSON, OData and other data sources. It can not only complete cross-source data modeling by dragging, but also support directly writing SQL statements or calling existing stored procedures. Finally, through data model access control and row-level data access rights management, it can be safely shared with BI analysts or report statisticians.

(picture source network)

Single sign-on and access control

It has a complete user permission function, and also supports integration with users of the application system through separate login (SSO). At the same time, the role-based permission control method provides fine-grained permission control capabilities to match the high data security requirements of SaaS software. .
- Function usage rights, you can control the creation and viewing rights of data sources, datasets, dashboards, and reports according to roles.
- Document sharing permission, you can write dashboards and reports to other users in a read-only or writable manner.
- Data access rights, data filtering based on user context, different data rows will be returned when different users use the same dataset.
- Page element permissions, when different users view the same report, they can display different content according to their roles to effectively protect sensitive data.

Multiple deployment and platform integration capabilities

Support multiple deployments, such as local deployment, the final release method can be determined by the business system, private deployment or public deployment can be used. At the same time, the product can be combined with a variety of development platforms, and has the characteristics of being independent of the development platform.
- Release method, can be installed on Linux, Windows and Docker, supports enterprise on-premises deployment, private cloud and public cloud deployment.
- The network environment, supports the operation of the network environment, and also supports the operation in the enterprise local area network.
- Development platform, available for Java, .NET, PHP, HTML5 development platforms and technologies; can be integrated with web programs (B/S), desktop programs (C/S) and mobile APPs.

Summarize

This article starts from the data insight capability of SaaS in detail, and introduces the powerful strength of SaaS in terms of data analysis, white label OEM, business integration, single point control, platform deployment and other capabilities. In the next part, we will start from a specific example, taking Wyn as an example, to show you what the spark of the collision between SaaS and BI is, please wait and see~