SELF SERVICE AUDIT ANALYTICS

Dubai real estate market shows continues growth, driven by general optimism and confidence in the sector. The Dubai Land Department, DLD, has revealed that real estate transactions in Dubai for the first three months of 2018 totaled AED58 billion through 13,759 sales.

Selected Category = VALUES(Orders[Category])

Selected Colour bar = 
var selected_category = VALUES ('Selected Category'[Category]) 
var category_to_highlight = SELECTEDVALUE (Orders [Category])
var filtered = ISFILTERED ('Selected Category'[Category])
var result = 
    SWITCH(TRUE(),NOT(filtered),"#0055cc", category_to_highlight in selected_category && filtered,"#0055cc","#9cd0ed")
return result

var selected_category = VALUES ('Selected Category'[Category]) // taking values from category table

var category_to_highlight = SELECTEDVALUE (Orders [Category]) // Using selected value function 

var filtered = ISFILTERED ('Selected Category'[Category]) // checks if the column is filtered and will return true or false

var result = 
SWITCH(TRUE(),NOT(filtered),"#0055cc", category_to_highlight in selected_category && filtered,"#0055cc","#9cd0ed") 

return result

We are thrilled to recognize Beinex Consulting for being named Alteryx Middle East Partner of the Year!https://t.co/xwmp7HbsMp#TogetherWeSolve pic.twitter.com/4zic9mdlgD

— Alteryx (@alteryx) October 1, 2020

How User Roles and Permissions Facilitate Implementing Data Governance

The Alteryx Server helps enterprises implement effective data governance by ensuring every user operation is based on pre-defined user roles and permissions. It optimizes processes and access control and ensures data integrity. User Roles Defining user roles helps businesses ensure a safe and efficient analytics setting that aligns with best data governance practices. Each role assigned to users ensures they have the right level of access to perform their tasks. • Curator /Server Admin: Accessing the admin interface to run administrative tasks- crucial in enforcing governance policies. • Artisan: Publishing, running, and sharing workflows in their private studio and shared collections- ensures control over their workspace. • Member: Running workflows that are shared with them via collections – supports collaboration without giving excess control while adhering to data regulations. • Viewer: Running public workflows on the Server UI home page and in districts – ensures workflow integrity by limiting them to consumption roles. • No Access: No access to all Server assets- ensures data security for confidential data. User Permissions Besides user roles, you can set user permissions to decide what users can do in the Server UI. User permissions are paramount to upholding robust data governance and ensuring that users can only perform tasks within their scope of responsibility. • Scheduling workflows to run at a planned time – ensures timely task completion without manual intervention. • Prioritizing jobs to run those with the highest priority first- facilitates effective resource allocation and alignment with requirements. • Tag a specific worker to run a workflow- ensures resources are allocated right. • Create new collections within a defined structure- supports collaboration without risking data privacy. • Granting server API access to users- enables task automation without compromising governance • Allowing users to create or edit DCM assets- controls access to shared credentials and connections. • Sharing DCM Connection Credentials to run on the server- ensures data security, which is crucial for governance. • Sharing DCM Connection Credentials for collaboration- strengthens data governance by securely handling confidential and sensitive data. • Managing generic vaults- enables secure handling of credentials and sensitive data. • Blocking the user from accessing the Server UI- ensures that only authorized individuals can interact with sensitive data.

How to ensure Effective Data Governance?

For organizations to cater to their specific requirements, implementing and maintaining an effective data governance process is required, which is briefed below:  • Identifying the data assets of your organization. • Classifying your data based on significance and prioritizing data governance actions • Ensuring accuracy, completeness, and consistency of your data for efficient data quality management. • Safeguarding data from unauthorized access • Controlling data access, including giving and withdrawing access to data • Managing your organizational data throughout its lifecycle

Data Governance in Alteryx: Best Practices

The blog gives you a walkthrough of the best practices about how Alteryx handles data governance by ensuring data management and quality.

1. Authenticating and Authorizing Data: The initial aspect to address in data governance strategies is how data is accessed. Alteryx supports the existing safety measures implemented at the database level; it utilizes your username and password when connecting to your data. These credentials authenticate users and ensure they can only access the data permitted. Alteryx also supports pass-through authentication, facilitating access to data using network identity and authenticating users with the same credentials they use for access. It eliminates the need to manage separate usernames or passwords within Alteryx. In short, Alteryx easily integrates with your organization's existing security infrastructure, leveraging authentication mechanisms to ensure secure data access. 2. Managing Data Effectively: A standout factor in Alteryx's data management is that it does not require the creation of a distinct persistence layer for data storage during processing. The Alteryx server is designed to support multi-tenancy, using in-memory processing and handling temporary data in a sandboxed setting. This means that a single instance of an Alteryx Server can manage multiple workflows simultaneously. Different departments can use the same platform without the risk of unauthorized data access between them. 3. Tracking Data Lineage The drag-and-drop interface of Alteryx offers robust visualizations of the transformations occurring within the workflow. Organizations get a detailed knowledge of the data sources, how they are collected, prepared, blended, and analyzed, the workflows being run, and the count of records read and written. 4. Defining Data Ownership and Stewardship Establishing clear data ownership and stewardship and assigning responsibilities for data sets and workflows is important, especially in an environment like Alteryx where multiple users engage with data. Data ownership is about taking responsibility for the accuracy, privacy, and availability of a data set. Data Stewardship ensures data integrity and quality by implementing policies and ensuring proper documentation. Defining these roles clearly within the organization fosters accountability and reduces data misuse risk. 5. Leveraging Metadata and Data Cataloging Metadata is integral to comprehending your data's context and lineage. The Alteryx Connect tool helps handle metadata and build a centralized data catalog. Data catalogs allow users to discover available data easily, track where the data comes from, and enhance collaboration by sharing and reusing datasets and workflows. 6. Ensuring Data Security and Access Controls When using Alteryx, enforcing appropriate security measures ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive data. To minimize the risk of a data breach, Alteryx helps organizations by providing robust user access control options, supporting encryption of sensitive data, and establishing validating processes for workflows. 7. Monitoring Data Quality Data quality is paramount to effective data governance. Alteryx streamlines and automates data quality monitoring by: • Providing data profiling and validation tools to check for duplicates, inconsistencies, and missing values. • Utilizing Alteryx Server to schedule periodic audits, maintaining data integrity over time. • Setting up alerts or automated reports to notify data owners or stewards of any data quality issues that arise. Data governance is beyond data management. It extends to the policies and processes that decide how an organization should use data while aligning with its goals. With effective data governance, businesses can boost data accuracy and security, enhance efficiency, and boost business value by complying with regulations, tracking data quality, and eliminating discrepancies. With Alteryx's built-in capabilities and powerful tools, organizations can manage the multidimensional challenges of data governance.

Once a workflow is built, users want to share, secure, schedule, and monitor the assets that have been built. Alteryx Server allows users to publish their workflows to a central location where the workflows can be stored, shared, and controlled in a safe and “enterprise-grade” solution.

Challenge

• The IT infrastructure of MyWhoosh where the Alteryx Server platform was hosted was in an on-premise datacenter which was designed to be scalable and robust with multi node physical clusters including the server, storage and network components. However, most of the physical hardware was quite old and not equipped with the latest generation of physical servers.
• Frequent hardware crashes and portal downtime kept troubling the availability of the Alteryx Server application. Assigning a touch hand support person to power on the hardware that was down seemed quite impossible due the restrictions during covid period. Hence, MyWhoosh wanted to look for another viable solution.
• Though the hardware setup at MyWhoosh was well equipped to meet the occasional spikes in the traffic, it was observed that over a course of 6-month time, most of the IT infra was underutilized than predicted. It was realized that spending huge amount of money on an old hardware plus software maintenance, license costs, internet bandwidth, datacenter cooling and maintenance, touch support personnel and electricity costs – were keeping the business operations challenging.
• There was an attempt by MyWhoosh to select a cost-effective solution that can host Alteryx Server application servers, web servers and archival data. This way IT infra can be re-provisioned to host sensitive data on-premise and the rest on the cloud, thereby reducing the overall physical hardware costs spent on a yearly basis.

Why AWS

• MyWhoosh decided to migrate Alteryx Server, database servers and archival data to AWS.
• The Alteryx Server’s AWS architecture includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), that provides complete control of its computing resources, updates to tables in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and AWS Elastic Load Balancer was used to distribute the traffic to the underlying EC2 instances based on the load.

Benefits

• MyWhoosh uses AWS services to provision infrastructure and deploy the Alteryx Server platform to other departments within it. In addition, the Alteryx Server resources that are no longer required to be run all the time are made to auto shutdown thus saving cost. MyWhoosh reported a 30% cost reduction after implementation of AWS for the Alteryx Server platform.
• The implementation of Alteryx Server on AWS made MyWhoosh confident in the security of its data, and its accreditation team is enthusiastic about the monitoring and auditing capabilities provided by AWS tools. With the implementation of IAM roles, MyWhoosh IT team was able to isolate systems and tightly control user accesses. These capabilities were harder to achieve within the existing infra but were available out of the box with AWS
• By adopting AWS to host the Alteryx Server platform, MyWhoosh has been able to innovate and experiment to a degree previously impossible. For example, MyWhoosh compared the performance and cost-effectiveness of three different cloud solutions. Without moving to the AWS, the costs associated with running an outdated on-premise hardware would have creeped up and the alternative way of upgrading the existing on-prem infrastructure to the latest hardware models and then hosting the Alteryx Server application on top of it would have taken months.