In today’s data-driven business landscape, enterprise analytics plays a crucial role in informed decision-making and maintaining a competitive edge. Microsoft’s Power BI service has emerged as a powerful tool for organizations seeking robust, scalable, and user-friendly analytics solutions. This blog will delve into some of the key features that make Power BI service an excellent choice for enterprise analytics, with a focus on accessibility, integration, and proactive insights.

1. Mobile Access: Analytics on the Go

In an increasingly mobile world, the ability to access critical business insights anytime, anywhere is paramount. Power BI’s mobile app brings the full power of your analytics to your smartphone or tablet, enabling you to: 

– View and interact with dashboards and reports

– Set up mobile-optimized views of your reports 

– Annotate and share insights directly from your device 

– Use natural language queries to get quick answers


To get started with the Power BI mobile app, simply download it from your device’s app store. Once installed, log in with your work email address to access your workspace and Power BI reports. This seamless integration ensures that you have the same secure access to your data on mobile as you do on your desktop, maintaining data governance and security protocols.

• Best Practice: Design your reports with mobile in mind. Use the “Phone Layout” feature in Power BI Desktop to create mobile-optimized versions of your dashboards and reports. 
  The following screenshot illustrates the Power BI mobile app, showcasing how reports and dashboards appear on a mobile device:

2. Seamless Integration with Microsoft Teams

As remote and hybrid work models become the norm, integration with collaboration tools is more important than ever. Power BI’s integration with Microsoft Teams allows you to: 

– Embed interactive Power BI reports directly in Teams channels and chats

– Collaborate on data analysis in real-time with colleagues 

– Share and discuss insights without leaving the Teams environment 

– Set up data-driven alerts within Teams

• Best Practice: Use the Power BI tab in Teams to create a centralized location for your most important reports and dashboards, making it easy for team members to access critical data within their daily workflow.
  The screenshot below shows how a Power BI report can be viewed on a Microsoft Teams:

3. Automated Report Distribution with Subscriptions

In the high-stakes world of business, staying ahead means staying informed. But let’s face it: nobody dreams of waking up to a flood of reports. That’s where Power BI’s subscription feature comes in, turning information overload into actionable insights at a glance. Instead of drowning in data, decision-makers can now receive a concise snapshot of their most critical metrics right when they need it – whether that’s with their morning coffee or just before a crucial meeting. This smart approach to information sharing ensures that key stakeholders are always equipped with the latest data, without the need to dig through dashboards or lengthy reports. Power BI’s subscription feature allows you to:

– Schedule automatic delivery of reports and dashboards via email 

– Set up different subscription schedules for various stakeholders 

– Send snapshots or links to live reports 

– Manage subscriptions centrally for better control and governance 

• Best Practice: Use row-level security in combination with subscriptions to ensure that each recipient only receives the data they’re authorized to view.
  The following screenshot displays the interface for setting up a Power BI report subscription and how the subscription email come in your inbox.

4. Proactive Insights with Data Alerts

To truly excel, businesses need proactive tools that offer real-time insights and early warnings. Power BI’s data alert feature is designed precisely for this purpose, helping you stay ahead of the curve by : automatically notifying you of critical changes and anomalies in your data, allowing you to address issues before they escalate, and making informed decisions with up-to-date information. Power BI’s data alert feature allows you to:

– Set up custom alerts based on specific metrics or KPIs

– Receive notifications when data changes meet your defined criteria 

– Configure alert sensitivity to avoid notification fatigue 

– Share alerts with team members for collaborative monitoring

• Best Practice: Start with a few critical metrics for alerts and gradually expand. This helps prevent alert overload and ensures that notifications remain meaningful and actionable.

The screenshot below illustrates the process of creating a data-driven alert in Power BI:

Overview

Power BI service offers a comprehensive suite of features that cater to the complex needs of enterprise analytics. By leveraging mobile access, Teams integration, automated subscriptions, and proactive alerts, organizations can foster a data-driven culture that empowers employees at all levels to make informed decisions.

As you implement Power BI in your organization, remember that successful adoption goes beyond just the technology. Focus on user training, establish clear data governance policies, and continuously gather feedback to refine your analytics strategy. 

By harnessing the full potential of Power BI service, your organization can transform raw data into actionable insights, driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape. 

This blog post is in continuation to “Why Migrate Legacy Applications to Containers and What are the Challenges this Brings?” where we dove into the transformative world of containerization and learnt why migrating your legacy applications to containers not only future-proofs your infrastructure but also enhances scalability, efficiency, and consistency.

In this part, unravel the complexities of planning a successful migration to containers. From assessing your applications to choosing the right tools, get expert insights into each step of the planning phase.

The migration starts with an assessment of existing applications. It is a very exploratory venture. This step is really key, as it tells which applications are going to be the best fit for containerization and which are likely to need too much alteration. Here’s the process of conducting this assessment:

• Application Inventory: Inventory of all applications and services that are running in the current environment. The inventory should be covering the software details, version of the software, underlining infrastructure, dependencies, and usage statistics.

• Dependency Mapping: Create detailed dependency maps for each application, including libraries, external services, and data stores they communicate with. Define and create such relations in a container environment using a tool like Docker Compose.

• Identify Probable Candidates for Challenges: Search for anything that can act as a hindrance to your migration, such as tightly coupled components, stateful applications, or compliance requirements that might drive what applications need re-architecture or migrate first.

Choosing the Right Tools

In considering a transition to containers, some really key things are identified in terms of the tools and platforms. Docker and Kubernetes are the most popular, but they carry different purposes:

• Docker: This is an accompanying tool in running containers, which empowers users to create, deploy, and run them using simple commands and a Dockerfile. In controlling the lifecycle of the container and developing a container-based application in a local environment, Docker would be perfect.

• Kubernetes: While Docker orchestrates at an individual container level, Kubernetes does orchestration of containers at a larger scale. It does deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines. It has come out with all the prominence and importance in today’s production environments that call for high availability, escalation, and load balancing.

When choosing tools, consider:

• Compatibility: Ensure the tools integrate well with your existing CI/CD pipelines and development workflows.

• Scalability: Always go for tooling that will scale with the demands of your application. For example: In case your deployment is of large scale, then Kubernetes is a brilliant tool for that.

• Community Support: Prefer options that have strong community support and documentation, if available and reflect reliability and long-term viability.

Strategies for a Smooth Migration

Approaching migration with a structured strategy can greatly enhance the process:

• Start Small: Make sure to use the lowest criticality or simpler applications first. This will enable you to both manage your risks and learn from the process without impacting major systems.

• Pilot Projects: Pilot migration projects provide valuable feedback. Choose a project characteristic for a typical application within an organization but carrying no significant business risk.

• Gradual scale-up: After your pilot project is successful, you can start to scale up your migration efforts very gradually. Learn from your mission-critical and more complex applications’ mistakes.

• Consider refactoring: Some applications may need refactoring before being containerized. For example, refactoring can mean that one would split a monolithic application into a set of microservices or make an application stateless if possible.

Ensuring your team is container-ready is as important as the technical migration aspects. Provide training to upskill the existing team on resources available over the internet on container technologies and Kubernetes. For example, there are a number of online platforms providing courses related to this from introductory to an expert level.

Of course, this would be very strategic to bring in an external organization to help in the shifting of legacy applications to containers. This brings out a number of advantages that would help in smoothening the process, reducing the risks, and realizing more benefits from the move into a containerized environment. Here are some compelling reasons and advantages for enlisting external expertise:

Access to Specialized Knowledge and Experience:

Expertise: Providing years of expertise around container technologies and their migration to success across many industries. They bring experience
involving best practices and potential pitfalls your migration can be involved in.

Stay Abreast with Technology: That’s the sure deal that your solutions are in line with advancements in technology, such as new developments in
containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes. In essence, you will be able to implement the best and efficient state-of-the-art
solutions.

Enhanced Focus on Core Business Activities:

• Resource Allocation: Outsourcing ensures that most of the technical complexities involved in the migration are offloaded; this enables your
internal teams to remain focused on the core business functions rather than drift into the many demands of a complex migration project.
• Reduced Learning Curve: Your staff does not need a couple of days or weeks to train in order to be up-to-date with container technology. The outsourced team will help fill the skills gap and assist your business in adaptation to new technologies much quicker and more productively.

Risk Mitigation:

• Tried-and-Tested Methodologies: This would mean that, while the provider’s internal team might have much more knowledge of an organization’s IT setup, they would use proven methodologies—developed over many projects—as a much better insurance policy against risks

• Unchanging support: They provide unchanging support and maintenance post-migration, which helps in very quickly getting issues resolved and making iterative improvements to the infrastructure.

Cost Efficiency:

• Predictable Spending: The cost of outsource teams may be lower than developing an internal team, for there would be added costs from the companies involving recruitment, training, and the retention of services from experienced IT practitioners.

• Scalability: The outer crew can increase their services according to your project needs. This is much more flexible in comparison to hiring employees on a full-time basis, and therefore, much better budget control is allowed.

Accelerated Migration Timeline:

• Faster Timeframe: Having expert external teams with relevant experience and resources will make a huge difference to the timeframe it takes to
complete the migration. This will be enabled by the tools and processes they have, making it easy to transfer the applications with minimal disturbances from the day-to-day operations.

• Immediate impact: from improved scalability, better efficiency, and improved operational flexibility, these benefits of the rapid deployment bring the
containerization in the organization’s life sooner than later.

Objective Assessment and Customization

• Unbiased Recommendations: Get the unbiased recommendations for your IT infrastructure or those even changes that your team may overlook.

• Solutions Tailored for You: They bring their knowledge of serving the tailored solutions that fit differing organizational needs and constraints to perfection. So, the migration strategy aligns spot-on with your business goals.

At Mismo Systems, we understand that migrating your legacy applications to containers can seem daunting. That’s why our team of experienced engineers is dedicated to simplifying your transition, ensuring a smooth and efficient migration process. With our expertise, you can unlock the full potential of containerization to enhance scalability, efficiency, and deployment speed.

Why Choose Mismo Systems?

• Expert Guidance: Our seasoned engineers guide you through the entire migration process, from initial assessment to full-scale deployment, ensuring your business achieves its strategic goals with minimal disruption.

• Customized Solutions: At Mismo Systems, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all answers. We create tailored solutions that fit the unique needs of your business and maximize your investment in container technology.

• Ongoing Support: Post-migration, our support team is here to help you manage your new containerized environment, from optimizing performance to implementing the latest security protocols.

If you’re ready to transform your legacy applications with containers, Mismo Systems is your go-to partner. Contact us today to learn more about how we can lead your business into the future of technology.

At this point, you should have a pretty good foundation under you for planning your migration to containers. Remember that the steps above will help ensure that you are not just transitioning properly but in a manner that is sustainable.

What is CI CD?

Continuous Integration

Developers work on the code which is stored in a code repository.  Code repository can be GitHub, AWS CodeCommit etc. As developers keep making changes to the code and push to the code repository, a build server builds the code and runs the tests. Build Server can be AWS CodeBuild, Jenkins etc.

This process is called continuous integration. Developers focus on developing code and not building and running tests. It helps to identify and fix bugs faster and have code available for frequent releases.

Continuous Delivery and Deployment

With Continuous integration, you have automated the code build and testing. The next step is to deploy the code. For this, you can use a deployment server which can be AWS CodeDeploy, Jenkins etc. The deployment server will take the code from the build server and push the code to the test/prod environment.

With Continuous delivery, you will have a manual step to approve the deployment. The deployment will be automated and repeatable. With Continuous deployment, no manual steps are required, and deployment will be fully automated.

In practical scenarios, continuous deployment can be used to push the deployment to test & UAT servers while manual approval can be used for production deployment.

Also Read:- Breakout Rooms and Its Usage – Microsoft Teams

AWS Technology Stack for CI CD

Code Commit can be used as a private code repository for version control for collaboration, backup and audit. It includes all the benefits of AWS i.e., Scale, Security, Compliance and integration with other services including AWS Code Build, Jenkins etc. You can use GIT to integrate your local repository with the Code Commit repository. You can configure role-based access, notifications and triggers. For e.g. You can configure a trigger to execute a lambda function for automation.

Code Build A fully managed build service can be an alternative to tools like Jenkins. It has all the benefits of a managed service i.e., scale, security and no maintenance overhead and power of integration with services like Cloud Watch for notifications & alerts and Lambda for automation. It uses Docker containers under the hood (you can use your own docker image as well), is serverless and pure Pay as You Go (PAYG).

Code Deploy managed service by AWS is to deploy code on EC2 instances or on-premises machines. Code deploy can be used instead of tools like terraform, ansible etc. if it meets your requirement of continuous deployment. You can group the environment such as prod, dev etc. Code deploy will not provide resources for you. Code deploy agent will be running on the server/EC2 instance and will perform the deployment.

Code Pipeline to orchestrate the whole deployment. It supports code repositories such as GitHub, Code Commit, build tools such as Code Build, Jenkins, deployment tools such as Code Deploy, Terraform, and load testing tools. It creates artefacts for each stage.

All these services can easily use powerful management and monitoring tools like CloudWatch for logging and monitoring.

This is one of the major cloud concerns for many companies, but it is irrational. Your IT team manages access, sets rights and restrictions, and provides smartphone access and options & your corporation remains the sole owner of the venture. You maintain your rights, title, and interest in the data contained in Office 365.

When safeguarding your data, we operate under several key principles:

•  We may not use your data for advertising purposes or for any reason other than supporting you with services that you have paid for.
•  If you want to change providers, you will be taking your data with you.
• Privacy controls enable you to configure who has access to and what they can access in your company.
•  Extensive auditing and monitoring avoid admins from getting inappropriate access to your files.
•  Customer Lockbox for Office 365 leaves customers with clear power in unusual cases where a Microsoft developer could perhaps need to access customer data to tackle an IT problem.

Strict safeguards and architecture elements preclude your data from mingling with those of other organizations, and our data centre workers will never have unprivileged access to your data which is one of the major cloud concerns. 

The standard establishes a uniform, international approach to protecting privacy for personal data stored in the cloud. It reinforces that:

• You are in control of your data.

• You are aware of what is happening with your data.

• We provide strong security protection for your data.

• Your data will not be used for advertising.

• Microsoft encourages government inquiries to be made directly to you unless legally prohibited and will challenge attempts to prohibit disclosure in court.

Follow us on Quora for Cloud related queries!

In this blog I will be talking about the Top 10 elements of Cloud.

Virtual Network: Create a logically isolated section in Microsoft Azure and securely connect it outward.

VM: Windows Azure Virtual Machines is a scalable, on-demand IaaS platform you can use to quickly provision and deploy server workloads into the cloud. Once deployed, you can then configure, manage, and monitor those virtual machines, load-balance traffic between them.

Azure Storage: Microsoft Azure Storage is a Microsoft-managed cloud service that provides storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant.

Load Balancer: A load balancer that distributes incoming traffic among backend virtual machine instances.

Azure Traffic Manager: Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic for service endpoints in the different datacentre.

Application Gateway: Scalable layer-7 load balancer offering various traffic routing rules and SSL termination for the backend.

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR): BCDR plan is a plan to keep your data safe, and apps/workloads running when planned and unplanned outages occur.

Azure Active Directory:  (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s Cloud-Based identity and access management service, which helps your employees sign in and access.

Azure Backup: Simple and reliable server backup to the cloud.

Reliable off site data

a) Convenient offsite protection
b) Safe data
c) Encrypted backups

A simple and integrated solution

a) Familiar interface
b) Windows Azure integration

Efficient backup and recovery

a) Efficient use of bandwidth and storage
b) Flexible configuration
c) Flexibility in recovery
d) Cost-effective and metered by usage

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed computing model designed for developers to stream high-bandwidth files faster, efficiently, and reliably to worldwide customers. Azure CDN is typically used for delivering static content such as Images, Videos, Style sheets, documents, files, Client-side scripts, and HTML pages to customers using servers that are closest to users.

 App Service Plan: App Service plans to represent the collection of physical resources used to host your apps.

Azure Web Apps: Azure Web Apps enables you to build and host web applications in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure.

Azure SQL: A relational database-as-a-service, fully managed by Microsoft. Delivers predictable performance, elastic scale, business continuity, and programmatic functionality. For cloud-designed apps when near-zero administration and enterprise-grade capabilities are key.

Thanks for reading!

Cloud computing provides users with access to files, applications, data, and services from their Internet-connected devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and computers. Cloud computing also allows data collection and storing in a role that is independent of end-users. How Cloud Computing Can Boost Your Enterprise? This method is intended to allow companies of any size to make use of advanced software and information technology infrastructure to become more predominant and versatile, as well as to compete with much larger companies. Cloud computing, unlike traditional software and hardware, encourages companies to remain at the forefront of new tech without the need to make major investments in making purchases. In general, cloud computing requires being able to view and store services and data over the Internet rather than over hard drives.

Realizing the many benefits cloud computing provides to organizations and enterprises, we may make a strong argument that cloud infrastructure is also becoming a modern trend. Cloud infrastructure allows the world to address potential issues such as the management of big data, quality control, and cybersecurity. (Read:- How moving to the cloud reduces your impact on the environment?)

We at Mismo Systems have laid down a few important benefits of cloud computing that would help your business in increasing productivity!

Budget-friendly operations

You do not have to pay a penny on data upkeep, fuel costs, updates, or app licenses. This influence is the primary explanation of why a significant proportion of start-ups and small businesses use cloud computing to lower their costs.

24/7 Data Backup

If you want to secure your data and you do not have access to stable infrastructure, you need to implement a cloud storage backup plan.

If you want to keep your backup records on-site or want to access your finances from anywhere at any moment, cloud storage is the perfect way to protect your data.

In emergency conditions or system faults, such as flooding or burning, the data will never be destroyed as cloud storage immediately saves the data to their secure database servers. Or, if unexpected situations arise, you can quickly back up the data in minutes. In addition, it provides geo-redundancy measures in order to protect the data in a variety of centres in different locations.

Magnified Teamwork

Cloud technology helps enhance collaboration by helping different groups of people to compile a report remotely and effectively in real-time and via shared storage. This effect can reduce the amount of time on the market and enhance services and customer development.

In addition, you can save a huge amount of cash that you have to waste on upgrading the devices. By funding cloud computing providers with a low monthly charge, you can perform your company transactions effectively. It would also enable you to reduce your expenses by eliminating new users by using more restricted storage capacity to help decrease your running costs.

Improved Actions

You will be able to manage the business processes on a timely basis by running cloud computing programs. This feature will not only alert you as to what is latest, but it will also help you save a substantial amount of time. As a result, you can spend your precious time improving your efficiency.

With a variety of servers, cloud infrastructure allows customers to run their enterprises without any issues. We all recognize that individuals who are important members of the team will be able to access cloud services from different areas of the world in minutes.

Amplified Output

We also understand that we require balanced capital to increase productivity. Since cloud storage firms would work together better by storing information and records on the cloud, the productivity of each team member will gradually increase. This influence is the reason why companies carry out all their cloud-based initiatives to offer connectivity to those who are core components of their ventures.

You may change access conditions, and you can easily delete any limitations if any team members have permission to work on the project from other areas. Therefore, if you are still looking for something that can improve performance and competitiveness, then you need to choose this modern method.