The ability to compile and visualize data from multiple sources is not anything new. As the article mentions Excel has been doing it for years including charting. The self-service aspect of Power BI and it’s broad spectrum of integration sources are the keys to adoption and benefit. Changing reporting criteria with a mouse click puts the power in the casual user’s hands.

The best way to think of Microsoft Power BI is as the next generation of Excel. And like Excel, it’s not just useful for business analysts and data engineers; IT pros can also take advantage of it for understanding large amounts of data. If the security tools you use don’t have dashboards and reports that help you quickly grasp what’s going on with your systems, you can build them yourself in Power BI — and you don’t need to be an expert in analytics to create something useful.

“With very little training, we have seen folks creating detailed and interactive reports that really help with compliance, audit, and security reporting,” Amir Netz, technical fellow and chief technology officer for Power BI, told TechRepublic.

Obviously, you can use Microsoft Power BI to monitor Power BI usage, using the Power BI Admin APIs to track who is accessing data and visualisations and make sure it’s only the people you expect to have access to what might be critical or confidential business information (which role-based access and Microsoft Information Protection will ensure, as long as you’ve set that up). Monitoring user access permissions on Power BI workspace and artifacts means the IT department can feel sure sure they follow auditing and security requirements, Netz said.

That can apply to any critical enterprise assets, thanks to Power BI integration with Microsoft Cloud App Security and Microsoft 365 compliance tools. “Microsoft Cloud App Security enables organizations to monitor and control, in real time, risky Power BI sessions such as user access from unmanaged devices. Security administrators can define policies to control user actions, such as downloading reports with sensitive information. With Power BI‘s MCAS integration, you can set monitoring policy and anomaly detection and augment Power BI user activity with the MCAS activity log.” Read On: