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What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool that comprises various cloud-based apps and services that assists organisations, individuals, or teams collect, process, and analyse data to create solutions.

Primarily, Power BI is utilised by businesses to run reports and generate insights from available company data. The resulting visuals and analysis reports can then be presented or distributed to the other members of the organisation.

Advantages of Power BI Over Other Platforms

1. Uncomplicated Interface

Microsoft Power BI features an easy-to-follow user interface; new users are not required to undergo training to understand the uncomplicated setup of the platform. It also resembles the build of Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft suites. There is minimal learning transition between the two.

2. Efficient Data Sharing and Real-time Dashboard Updating

Power BI has extensive database connectivity capabilities. Instead of using shared drives to distribute visualisation and reports, they can be uploaded directly to the Microsoft cloud platform and refreshed regularly up to 8 to 24 times a day.

Moreover, since Power BI is a cloud-based platform, the updates on the published information in the public dashboard happen in real-time. This feature allows users to view new data as it is streamed in, giving them the capability to solve complications and identity opportunities right away. Information updates may be collected and transmitted from time-sensitive data sources such as production data and social media sources.

3. Superior Security and Reliability

Data security is a significant concern among modern businesses. Hence, Power BI ensures that the data is safe from internal and external threats by utilising an enterprise-grade of security hosting the data.

Power BI services also follow the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), a framework and standard that supports security assurance and compliance requirements. Microsoft developed it in 2004 in response to the increasing threat of malware and computer virus. This security best practice framework ensures the security of Power BI is well designed, tested, and deployed to meet the standard.

4. Role Level Access

Power BI employs both role-level security and object-level security. Combined, these two give granular control over accessibility to mitigate the risk of people seeing data they don’t have the authority to view. This enables reinforced enterprise-grade security on datasets and reports, ensuring that sensitive data will only be available to users with the requisite permissions.

5. Fastest Growing Business Intelligence Tool

Power BI is the fastest growing BI tool that has attracted other independent developers to build custom visual and analytical tools to supplement the development process and create a more interactive dashboard. It is a key product of Microsoft that is continuously evolving, with ongoing feature updates every month.