Q: How do I display dashboards or reports on a screen (or multiple screens) in my office without making them publicly available?
That’s the question we’re going to answer today.
Quick answer: Using Secure Dashboards to deliver almost any password protected dashboard WITHOUT having to risk your data being shared on an open URL where it can be accessed by unwanted parties.
Watch the video here:
https://signagelive.wistia.com/medias/nytq0qgu3h?embedType=async&seo=true&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640&Maybe you’re a multi-national blue chip company or maybe you’re an up and coming start-up looking to modernise and streamline your office communication. You might be a QSR following the latest trends and financial reports of hundreds of franchisees. Whatever your situation, there’s always one thing that helps you grow and that’s DATA.
Everyone has their data vice, that one source of information that you’re constantly checking or cross checking for updates, whether it be PowerBI, Excel, Tableau, Sharepoint or many more.
BUT
Things get a little more complicated when this information needs to be shared between staff. What if you need to keep your call centre in the loop about the average pickup times? How about displaying sensitive data to your marketing teams without jeopardising the security of the information?
In the past, the only way to achieve this was to create a separate account, buy a PC and have it run behind your screen and just hope and pray Windows doesn’t want to update, your browser doesn’t crash, and you don’t get a pop-up (or anything else for that matter).
It’s clunky and it’s unscalable.
Now there’s a real solution to overcome this challenge and give you back the power that your data can offer. It’s called Secure Dashboards.
Q: So what is Secure Dashboards and how does it work?
Secure Dashboards puts security in the forefront of its workflow. Simply put, the system logs in to your application, grabs a screenshot of the dashboard or metric that you’d like to display and sends it to the list of approved players via Signagelive. Our Data Sync Services application makes sure that this process is done at the correct intervals and validates that the players the images are being sent to are approved to receive it.
Q: That sounds great but surely this is a security concern?
In the past, it has been. That’s why when we looked to create Secure Dashboards, we put security in the forefront of our development. Here are just some of the security features at play…
- Data is securely stored in our Cloud
- Data is only made available to Players that require access to it
- API Keys and credentials for external systems use a secure Secret Manager and not on the media players themselves
- Data is encrypted at rest
- Data is encrypted in transit
- No need to expose sensitive data with “Publish to Web” solutions as all integrations directly authenticate securely with the source
- Only the data that is required to be displayed on the player is transmitted to the player
Pretty incredible right?
Not just for a few dashboards
We’ve already mentioned some of the big-hitters in the dashboard industry but we know that there are so many dashboards out there to choose from depending on your needs. That’s why Secure Dashboards not only displays data from the most commonly used platforms but also works with almost any password-protected URL that follows best practices, so you aren’t limited to just a few options.
Q: That’s great, but what if you don’t support the dashboard that I’m using?
The biggest benefit of Secure Dashboards is that we aren’t specifying one specific platform. All the mentioned apps are accessed via the Signagelive Smart login process which canvasses the login URL and deciphers the area to submit username and password details, so you have a huge choice of dashboards to choose from.
Secure Dashboards has already been tested on Power BI, Sharepoint, Asana, Jira, SiSense, Gafana Labs, Qlik, Grow, Trello, Splunk, DataDog, Cyfe, New Relic and Monday.com but almost any other dashboard will also be supported.
Authenticated Websites
Most of your dashboards will be web-based and therefore display HTML5 dashboards. The challenge to getting to that data is creating a way to access that dashboard with your credentials safely. The challenge is finding a way to access and display your dashboards securely, without exposing your login credentials.
Data Sync Services handles your password as “write-only” which means that not even the platform itself knows what your password is, only that it can use those credentials to access your dashboard. API’s are “write-only”, meaning that passwords cannot be exposed.
Q: OK, so what happens if my login process changes or I need to update my password?
We’re always focused on SCALE, so the Secure Dashboard features “Smart Login”. This means that updating your credentials is a one-time experience, even if you’re running multiple dashboards from that service.
Let’s take PowerBI for example. Your Admin login allows you to generate sales reports for the sales team, as well as display analytics dashboards for your marketing colleagues and the latest product availability for your purchasing department. All of these dashboards are being delivered to the appropriate location through a single login but you’ve forgotten your password and need to create a new one.
Some platforms would require you to reconfigure your login details for every dashboard. If you’re running multiple dashboards from one service, that can be a logistical nightmare. With Smart Login, you enter your details once and your dashboards can pick up right where they left off!
Beyond dashboards
Secure Dashboards is the first functional application for Data Sync Services, but we see true set-it-and-forget functionality as a key for many larger and more involved Digital Signage networks – notably those that have a steady need to update content and do so in different ways based on factors like location, time and the characteristics of what’s done and produced, place by place.
For industrial applications, data can be reliably, and securely pulled from information systems with APIs and even from simple IoT (Internet of Things) sensors that are increasingly fundamental to production environments.
So, screens can reflect production volumes against targets, but they can also be tied to things like sensors that can trigger alarms for noxious gas leaks or spills, raising awareness as well as informing workers where the problem originates, what to do and where to go.
They can pair with programmatic advertising platforms to hyper-target messaging by location or other data attributes.
Longer term, we envision data sync capabilities empowering heavily automated content production, such as dynamic video rendering that sees data harvested, consolidated, structured and ready to do things like produce videos of hundreds or thousands of automated video messages for ever-changing listed products like resale cars or homes.
Want to learn more?
Download our Data Sync Services white paper for a deeper dive
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