Budgeting Made Easy: Beinex Budget Allocation Accelerator (Infographic)

TRANSFORM THE WAY YOU AND YOUR ORGANIZATION WORK WITH DATA –SELF SERVICE AUDIT ANALYTICS Increasing complexities of risks and incessant emergence of disruptive technologies are demanding substantial change in internal audit processes. In today’s world of constant disruption, internal audit should evolve into a dynamic and future-oriented function. Businesses need broad-spectrum audit processes that extend beyond reviewing the obvious. Auditors should adopt forward-looking IA approaches, and should be able to provide deeper and valuable insights on strategy, execution, emerging risks, and hidden opportunities. The 2016 Deloitte Global Chief Audit Executive Survey that polled more than 1200 CAEs from 29 countries and a diverse range of industries, reaffirms the growing need to conduct analytics-based auditing. More than a three quarter of the CAEs (79%) recommend the need for digital disruption and innovation to transform internal audit and enhance its value. The survey also cited the increasing relevance of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and visual analytics. Is skill-gap a concern? More than half of CAEs (57%) who participated in the survey expressed their intense dissatisfaction about inadequate skills and insufficient expertise of audit teams. When left unaddressed, these skill gaps will weaken auditors’ capabilities to deliver on changing stakeholder expectations. Stakeholders expect more forward-looking analysis to uncover risks and hidden opportunities. Or, gone are the days of static audit reports and analysis of sample data. The Deloitte survey also cites risk anticipation (39%) and data analytics (34%) as the two groundbreaking innovations that are most likely to impact internal audit within the next five years. Changing business landscapes, technological advancements, and proliferation of data have brought forth the imminent need to leverage analytics and data visualization to increase the impact, influence, and effectiveness of internal audit Analytics Adoption Challenges Even after 30 years of inception of data analytics, many auditors continue to adopt conventional internal audit methods and lag in technology adoption. Wondering why? Here are some of the reasons: Can technology disruption be a savior? Advancements in technology are fundamentally changing the nature of the audit and improving its effectiveness and relevance. Here are a few game-changing technology solutions that auditors can harness effectively to enhance the way they work with data: 1.Self-service analytics – Smart analytics for all Self-service analytics is no more a buzzword. It’s the new norm. Self-service analytics empowers auditors to access data, perform queries, and create interactive reports that add richness and granularity to the insights derived. Anyone and everyone, with or without technical expertise, can harness the power of self-service analytics to work seamlessly with large data sets of any size or type, and discover savvy insights without having to write codes or learn programming languages. Key advantages of using self-service analytics tools: Explore your data and create ad-hoc reports without IT skills 2.Mobile Analytics – Audit insights on the go Regardless of the size of an organization or availability of data, it takes weeks to prepare and present comprehensive audit reports. The numbers are usually saved offline as large files or copied to multiple slides for boardroom meetings. Mobile data analytics enables a concise and easily accessible digital avatar of audit reports and dynamic dashboards that can be accessed on mobile devices to interact and proactively monitor the business information on the go. 3.Data Visualization When it comes to presenting audit data, reports and findings, one gets a single view of the entire raw data, all at once. This makes it difficult to decipher what is important and what isn’t, the reason why the point of sharing information gets defeated. Data visualization helps get a flexible and reliable way to identify and share pertinent information in a manner that everyone can easily understand. There are many reasons why auditing is ripe for self-service analytics and visualization driven transformation. There is more data to examine within limited time span. Most financial and operational transactions are moving online, and the number of variables, outliers, trends, and patterns to identify and analyze continue to increase each day. Visual analytics is the fastest way to analyze and understand structured or unstructured data of any size, without IT assistance. Visual technologies help speed up and improve decision making with heat maps, bubble charts, and interactive dashboards that are easy for C-suite executive, non-technical business users, and stakeholders to understand. Everything gets better when you can do it yourself, right? Self-service audit analytics and visualization too are not different. Benefits of self-service analytics in Internal Audit

TABLEAU CATALOG What could be better than a feature that could provide better visibility and better data management at the same time, and also ensure that the right data is always used for analysis. This is possible with the new feature -Tableau Catalog. This feature provides a complete picture of the data and how each data is connected. Another use of Tableau Catalog is linear and impact analysis. This not only shows which assets will change but also who will be affected by it, which makes work easier for many and avoids wastage of time. EXPLAIN DATA Tableau 2019.3 is up with a new Al-driven feature called the “Explain Data”, which helps people go from the “what” of the data to the “how” of it. With explain data, we can get an explanation for each unexpected value in the data by just a single click. On selecting the desired data point, the ‘explain data’(lightbulb) icon appears. For each value there might be a number of explanations. Each of these explanations are checked and only the most likely ones are provided as visualizations. Now these visualizations can be used for further explorations. TABLEAU SERVER MANAGEMENT ADD-ON Organizations that run critical deployment of Tableau Server at a large scale, have mentioned concerns over manageability and scalability. They have been in search for tools that could organize the management process in an efficient way, which could save a lot of time. Tableau solved this problem by introducing the Tableau Server Management Add-on – a new feature designed to help organizations manage the deployment of Tableau Server. With this, they can quickly react to the changing needs of the business as well as save time by organizing the management process in the most efficient way. Tableau Server Management Add-on, which makes running the critical deployment of tableau at a large-scale server much simpler. The server management add-on feature can help in optimising the performance of deployment by customizing which nodes process background jobs such as extract refreshes and subscriptions and isolating these workloads, to specific nodes. This makes it easier to scale deployments to the needs of their organization. This feature has a few tools, including two for better reliability and scalability and one for content migration, all of which helps the organizations to govern their data effectively. If you are interested in learning more about the latest Tableau release and use cases, please contact us at training@beinex.com/ info@beinex.com and we would be happy to schedule a Tableau demo or training for you and your company.

Note: The Server Management Add-on is not available for Tableau Online, as they manage everything from scaling, performance, and security on behalf of their Tableau Online customers. The Tableau Server Management Add-on can be separately purchased from the Tableau Server deployment.

The adoption of digitalised solutions in the healthcare sector has been sparked by the pandemic and a sharp change in people's expectations and lifestyles. Additionally, consumers are in a better position since they enjoy high levels of digital connectivity thanks to reasonably priced internet access, various mobile device technologies, and a sizable app development ecosystem.

What is Gamification

Gamification, frequently used across various business use cases like loyalty management, has gained popularity in the healthcare sector over the past few years. It is the process of introducing game components to solutions, such as activity design, and providing incentives within already-existing processes to create engaging experiences and increase process adoption.

The main goals of gamification in healthcare are to tailor each patient's care and participation and to develop better patient-centred services. Since it incorporates action-based challenges and rapid rewards, gamification has increased patient motivation and engagement. This makes it easier for patients to keep track of their progress.

By using gamification tactics to organise their activities, gamified actions to fulfil the targets, and the chance to share their progress with others, patients can be guided, monitored, and kept interested.

Tracking symptoms and overall health: Instead of consulting doctors, most internet users conduct online searches for information on health-related topics or related topics. The patient's journey begins at this digital entrance. Healthcare providers have the chance to establish themselves as industry leaders by offering digital platforms for consumers to interact, measure wellness, and monitor their health metrics. Some widely used apps use gamification techniques to deliver physical treatment through a virtual learning environment. Motion-guided technology is used to monitor and guide patients. Healthcare professionals can connect to this platform, which enables patients to communicate virtually with licensed physical therapists.

Appointment scheduling: Giving patients a seamless appointment-making experience is one of the critical elements in patient engagement. Patients can use digital health platforms or applications to automatically book appointments with qualified practitioners based on their locations and symptoms. The gamification tactics that engage patients before entering medical facilities can reduce their worry about health outcomes.

Treatment and ongoing care: Data from activity and behaviour monitoring is integrated with health systems that can be used to enhance patient profiles. By better understanding the symptoms, doctors can correctly identify severe disorders. Remote patient activity and critical health metrics can be monitored with data integration between clinical health systems and health apps on patients' mobile devices. Some gamification applications are made to help users create customised health plans, track, and analyse behavioural patterns, and encourage adherence to plans by delivering reminders and tracking user behaviour.

Health insurance: The amount of engagement between patients and insurance companies is minimal. Medical bill payments, reimbursement, and claims are often the focus of this conversation. Nevertheless, by using gamification techniques, health insurance providers can expand and improve their services. Using virtual money and discounts to provide quotations is one example of how such tactics have been used. Price reductions for customers may be offered.

Healthcare providers who lead the charge in the digitalisation of healthcare will be those who use data linkages and gamification techniques to build and improve the patient journey. Applying gamification strategies across healthcare processes for proactive patient engagement and data analytics to monitor, predict, and design true personalisation across the illness or wellness lifecycle are critical components to achieving a fully digitalised healthcare ecosystem. Compliance, data security, and privacy continue to be critical issues. Healthcare providers must comply with patient privacy laws when implementing system integrations and gamified applications.

Gamification opportunities for the entire patient journey

A technology component at each stage of the patient journey can be leveraged to enhance the user experience. Gamified health platforms are projected to progressively use relationships with health providers, health data products, mobile apps, wearable devices, and insurance companies for data integration. Many data aggregators gather information from numerous other health monitoring applications on patients' mobile phones and wearable technology like smartwatches.

Digital services have been enthusiastically accepted all over the UAE. It has been incorporated into UAE healthcare to benefit patients and enhance outcomes in areas including chronic illness management, diagnostics, and preventative care. The UAE's most popular digital health solutions are online pharmacies, fitness applications, teleconsultations, online fitness classes, and diet-management apps.

You can build gamification capabilities and digitally transform your healthcare ecosystem by implementing data integration and analytics strategies, which Beinex Digital can assist you with.

1. Understand Your Audience

The best dashboards are built with a specific audience in mind. Consider who will be using your dashboard and what their goals are. Are they busy executives who need to quickly grasp key performance indicators (KPIs), or are they analysts who need to drill down into details? Once you know your audience, you can tailor your dashboard design to their needs. Source: https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/10-best-practices-building-effective-dashboards?utm_medium=blog

2. Optimize Layout

In today's mobile-first world, it's important to design dashboards that look good and function well on a variety of devices. When designing your dashboard, consider how your audience will be consuming the information. If they're primarily using mobile phones, you'll need to prioritize the most important KPIs and optimize the layout for a small screen.

3. Minimize Page Load Times

No one wants to wait for a dashboard to load. Slow load times can be caused by a variety of factors, including the size of your data set and the complexity of your visualizations. To improve load times, you can optimize your data queries, use extracts, and leverage Tableau's built-in performance optimization features.

4. Insights-Based Design

When designing your dashboard layout, consider how your audience will naturally "read" the information. Group related pieces of information together and use visual cues like shading, lines, and white space to guide the eye. The most important information should be placed in the upper left corner of the dashboard, as this is where most viewers will start looking.

5. Minimize Views and Colors

It's tempting to include every relevant piece of data in your dashboard, but this can lead to information overload. Stick to two or three key views, and use color strategically to highlight important trends or patterns. Avoid using too many colors, as this can make your dashboard visually overwhelming.

6. Incorporate Interactive Features

Dashboards are most powerful when they allow users to interact with the data. Use filters, highlights, and actions to let users explore the data in different ways. This will help them to gain a deeper understanding of the information and answer their own questions.

7. Arrange by Hierarchy

When formatting your dashboard, it's best to start with the largest elements and work your way down to the smallest. This will help you to avoid accidentally overwriting your changes. The hierarchy of dashboard formatting typically follows this order: theme, workbook, and worksheet.

8. Utilize Tooltips and Whitespace for Effective Design

Tooltips are a great way to provide additional information without cluttering up your dashboard. Use tooltips to display detailed data points or to link to external resources. White space is also essential for good dashboard design. It helps to improve readability and make your dashboard less visually overwhelming.

9. Prioritize Clarity

Every element on your dashboard should serve a purpose. If a title, legend, or axis label isn't necessary, get rid of it. Consider using a floating layout to create more white space and improve readability.

10. Ensure Dashboard Effectiveness

Once you've built your dashboard, it's important to test it with your target audience. Ask them how they're using the dashboard and if it helps them answer their questions. Use their feedback to iterate on your design and create dashboards that are truly effective.
By following these best practices, you can create dashboards that are clear, concise, and actionable. Effective dashboards will help your audience understand your data and make better decisions.

How Beinex Can Assist You

Beinex, a premier Tableau partner, provides sustainable analytics solutions to organizations and helps to build superior data visual analytics capabilities internally through our bespoke training programs. Our team of Tableau-certified consultants are real-life Tableau business users who are passionate about Tableau and delivering a world-class experience. Connect with us for a Tableau free trial: www.beinex.com/free-tableau-software
Image source: https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/10-best-practices-building-effective-dashboards?utm_medium=blog

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Agility

The cloud offers seamless access to diverse technologies, enabling swift innovation and the realization of any imaginable concept. Resources ranging from infrastructure services like computing, storage, and databases to advanced features like machine learning, Internet of Things, data lakes, and analytics can be swiftly provisioned to meet specific needs.

Elasticity

Cloud computing eliminates the need to allocate excessive resources in advance to accommodate future peaks in business activity. Instead, you can precisely provision the required resources, with the flexibility to scale them up or down instantly based on evolving business demands.

Cost-effectiveness

The cloud enables the transition from fixed expenses associated with data centres and physical servers to variable expenses, where you only pay for IT services as you consume them. Additionally, the economies of scale inherent in cloud services contribute to significantly lower variable costs than in-house solutions.

Global Deployment in Minutes

You can leverage the cloud for rapid expansion to new geographic regions, enabling global deployment within minutes. For instance, AWS boasts a global infrastructure footprint, enabling the deployment of applications across multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. This proximity to end users reduces latency and enhances the overall user experience.

Worldwide Vendor Market Share

Sourced from: Cloud Market Share Q2 2023: AWS, Microsoft, Google Battle | CRN

AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)

Amazon Web Services is the most extensive and widely adopted cloud platform worldwide, offering over 200 fully featured services across global data centres. AWS is used by millions of customers, including fast-growing startups, major enterprises, and prominent government agencies, to reduce costs, enhance agility, and accelerate innovation.

The USPs of AWS

Unparalleled Features and Services

AWS surpasses other cloud providers with a significantly larger array of services and features, ranging from infrastructure technologies like computing, storage, and databases to cutting-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, data lakes, analytics, and Internet of Things. This breadth of offerings facilitates a faster, easier, and more cost-effective transition of existing applications to the cloud and empowers the creation of any imaginable solution.

Extensive Network of Customers and Partners

AWS boasts the most extensive and dynamic community of tens of thousands of partners worldwide and millions of active customers. Clients from diverse industries and varying sizes, including the public sector, organizations, startups, and enterprises, run many use cases on AWS. The AWS Partner Network (APN) comprises thousands of systems integrators specializing in AWS services and thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) adapting their technology to integrate with AWS seamlessly.

Top Security Standards

AWS is the safest and most flexible cloud computing environment available. The foundational infrastructure meets the security standards for global banks, military, and other high-sensitivity organizations. This commitment to security is fortified by an extensive set of over 300 security, compliance, governance services and features, and support for 143 security standards and certifications.

Faster Innovation

AWS allows for faster experimentation and innovation by leveraging the latest technologies. The continuous acceleration of innovation at AWS results in the introduction of groundbreaking technologies that can transform businesses.

Operational Proficiency

AWS's unparalleled experience, reliability, maturity, performance, and security offer a dependable foundation for critical applications. With over 17 years of delivering cloud services to millions of customers globally across diverse use cases, AWS possesses the most operational experience at a larger scale than any other cloud provider.

Popular Customers of AWS

Netflix:Netflix relies on AWS for most of its computing and storage requirements, including analytics, databases, recommendation engines, video transcoding and numerous functions utilizing over 100,000 server instances on the AWS platform.
BMW Group: BMW Group leverages AWS to acquire the agility and flexibility necessary for democratizing data usage and expediting innovation.
Philips: Philips is an early adopter of AWS that utilizes AWS services to manage the Philips HealthSuite Platform, ensuring scalability, cost-effectiveness, and regulatory-compliant solutions.
Salesforce: Salesforce shares a global strategic relationship with AWS, utilizing AWS compute, storage and AI solutions to create and deploy innovative business applications.
Pinterest: The exabyte data platform of Pinterest is hosted exclusively on AWS, managing log search and analytics that surpass 1.7TB. This implementation has led to a 30% reduction in operational costs.
Coca-Cola: After its migration to AWS, Coca-Cola has reduced operational costs by 40% and IT ticket volume by 80%.

Regions & Availability

AWS boasts the most expansive global cloud infrastructure. Gartner has acknowledged the AWS Region and Availability Zone framework as the endorsed strategy for operating enterprise applications demanding high availability.
The AWS Cloud covers 102 Availability Zones across 32 geographic regions worldwide, with disclosed intentions to introduce an additional 15 Availability Zones and 5 AWS Regions in Germany, Canada, Thailand, Malaysia and New Zealand.

MICROSOFT AZURE

The Azure cloud platform encompasses over 200 products and services crafted to empower you to bring innovative solutions to fruition, addressing current challenges while shaping the future. It offers the flexibility to build, run, and manage applications across various clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, utilizing the tools and frameworks as per your preferences.

The USPs of Microsoft Azure

Rely on Cloud Capabilities

Acquire security from the ground up, supported by experts, and embrace proactive compliance trusted by enterprises, governments, and startups.

Operate Hybrid Seamlessly

Whether on-premises, across multiple clouds, or at the edge, Azure will meet you wherever you are. Integrate and manage your environments effortlessly with services specifically designed for hybrid cloud scenarios.

Build in Line with Your Terms

With a dedication to open source and support for all frameworks and languages, build in the manner that suits you best and deploy your creations wherever you choose.

Get Equipped for the Future

Microsoft's continuous innovation supports your current development needs and aligns with your visions for future products.

Popular Customers of Microsoft Azure

New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP): DEP uses a Microsoft infrastructure specifically designed with modern security considerations. With the solution in the cloud, Microsoft manages disaster recovery, reducing the necessity for maintaining certain skill sets in-house. CCC Group: CCC Group utilizes Azure Data Lake and Data Warehouse to collect, store, and segment data. Panasonic Connect Co: Panasonic Connect Co maximizes the benefits of PaaS services such as Azure IoT Hub, Synapse Analytics, and Azure Kubernetes Services. Hamburg Commercial Bank: Hamburg Commercial Bank opted for Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop to achieve improved performance, reliability, and enhanced interoperability with other Microsoft technologies previously invested in. Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust: Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust adopted a new, integrated platform using Power Platform and Microsoft Teams for video consultations. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the Trust rapidly deployed Microsoft Teams to facilitate remote work and staff collaboration.

Regions & Availability:

Microsoft operates highly secure data centre facilities globally, forming a distributed infrastructure that sustains thousands of online services. This expansive, globally distributed infrastructure prioritizes sustainability, bringing applications closer to users, ensuring data residency, and providing customers with comprehensive compliance and resiliency options.
As of March 2023, Microsoft Azure boasts 160 active data centres spread across 60 regions worldwide. These Azure regions, defined by geographical areas, house one or more physical Azure data centres. Operating within a latency-defined perimeter, these data centres are strategically positioned to deliver optimal performance and security to users.
Azure leads with over 60 announced regions, surpassing all other cloud providers. It is accessible in 140 countries, showcasing a global presence that sets it apart in cloud computing.

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM (GCP)

Google Cloud, also called Google Cloud Platform, offers computing resources dedicated to developing, deploying, and operating web applications. While its cloud infrastructure supports applications like Google Workplace, GCP primarily serves as a platform for constructing and managing custom applications. These applications can subsequently be published on the web, leveraging the extensive capabilities of its hyperscale data centre facilities.

The USPs of the Google Cloud Platform

Leveraging Data Effectively

Google’s comprehensive data foundation lets you integrate workloads and handle the complete data life cycle. This solution is engineered to operate data seamlessly across various environments, allowing you to utilize your data on any cloud, on-premises, and within popular SaaS applications. Designed with a focus on AI, it offers the latest tools for machine learning analysis, prompting, tuning, training, and deploying custom foundational models, all interconnected with your business data.

Revamping your Infrastructure with Modern Solutions

Google Cloud enables developers to build faster, safer, and cost-effectively utilizing the next generation of modern infrastructure tailored to specific workloads and industry requirements. Benefit from infrastructure optimized for AI, container-based applications, traditional enterprise workloads, and high-performance, distributed workloads, all while contributing to cost reduction and a reduced carbon footprint.

Fostering an Innovative Environment

GCP equips teams of all sizes to excel in their work regardless of the location and device. Google Workspace combines innovative tools favoured by the modern workforce for collaboration and creation, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Chat, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Meet. With over 3 billion monthly active users, Workspace is the most popular productivity and collaboration software globally, offering new, user-friendly, generative AI features to enhance team productivity.

Incorporating Built-in Security Features

Benefit from built-in security features that mirror the same capabilities Google employs to safeguard more individuals and organizations online than any other provider. Google aids organizations in transforming their cybersecurity programs by providing frontline intelligence from Mandiant to comprehend the latest cyber threats.

Popular Customers of the Google Cloud Platform

Etsy: Utilizing the collaborative tools offered in Google Workspace, Etsy meets the evolving needs of sellers and buyers innovatively, fostering continued growth and enhancing the sustainability of its operations. X (formerly Twitter): Twitter's complete shifting of its ad analytics data platform to Google Cloud granted developers increased agility, allowing them to configure existing data pipelines more easily and build new features acceleratedly. Airbus Defence and Space: Airbus Defence and Space's Intelligence business line employs Google Cloud to construct a scalable online platform, enabling customers to access petabytes of satellite imagery in real-time.

Regions & Availability

Google Cloud provides global coverage through regions distributed worldwide, ensuring low cost, minimal latency, and optimal application availability for customers.

Follow the link to have a look into a tabular comparison of the solutions provided by the CSPs: AWS, Azure and GCP. https://cloud.google.com/docs/get-started/aws-azure-gcp-service-comparison