Are you using BI dashboards in your company? Have you ever tried sharing them with your team (only every day, duh) or displaying them on your office TVs? Then you already know firsthand how difficult and insecure it is.
BI tools have exploded in popularity, but company-wide adoption of analytics is still a major challenge. Despite the popularity of self-service visualization tools, data is often still stuck at the top of the organizational hierarchy and is not being shared across teams. And you can feel it hampering your business.
The employees who need access to data for their day-to-day work need a simple solution that doesn't involve them having to search and rummage for answers. This is especially true for deskless workers - in industries like retail, healthcare, construction, manufacturing, and transportation - with no access to a work email who are often left without any concept of their targets, progress, or other useful & motivating insights.
“BI dashboards are hard to share,” says Fugo co-founder and CEO Camilla Chesham. "They have expensive license restrictions with limited user seats and are locked away behind security walls with annoying, but essential, logins. In fact, security concerns alone are enough to cause most companies to get put off sharing their dashboards via the usual email or URL channels altogether. A great way to overcome these issues and reap a whole host of additional benefits is to display your dashboards on your office screens. But we quickly discovered that this is easier said than done.”
Fugo CTO Zuka Kakabadze explains the challenges behind secure TV dashboards, "The existing solutions that launch dashboards from a browser just don't scale and suffer from two major problems: inconsistent playback due to the computing power needed to stream data-intensive dashboards and insecure methods of accessing dashboards that expose your security credentials to screen devices."
Our team has been hard at work solving this problem, which is what we aim to do with our latest release - Fugo TV Dashboards.
It's a clever bit of engineering that allows you to share data from almost any application (Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Klipfolio, etc) to TV screens, with zero licensing & security issues.
How does it work?
- You download Fugo to your screen device and connect your screen(s) to our CMS
- You install a Chrome extension that will allow Fugo to screen-record your steps as you log in to your preferred data tool and navigate to your dashboard
- You capture a screenshot of your dashboard
- Fugo stores this screenshot in a secure Cloud server and sends it to your screens to display
- Fugo updates the display every few seconds with a new snapshot that it got by reproducing your steps, showing you real-time data
Fugo TV Dashboards never exposes your dashboard access credentials to screen devices and players. Instead, it accesses them from a fully secure and isolated cloud environment and captures snapshots of your dashboards to display on your screens, updating in near real-time.
How does it keep your data secure?
We've made security the cornerstone here because most organizations using these analytics tools have to balance the two competing goals of sharing their data to the people for whom it would be most useful while also not giving away the keys to the castle, as it were.
Most existing TV dashboard solutions work by connecting to and accessing your login credentials to tools like Tableau or Looker from the screen device itself. This is a huge security risk because players can be hacked or hijacked. And beyond credentialing & access, other software may run on your device and might inspect data sent and received, a feature that bad actors could potentially exploit.
Fugo works around this in a really clever way - it never connects to the website that's storing data directly from the screen device where it's being displayed. The most insecure part of the process - the credentialing - is handled securely in the Cloud. And the data that gets displayed on the screen is essentially a screenshot instead of a doorway into a protected set of data.
To sum it all up:
- You do not have to create a public URL for your dashboard to share it on screen
- Your login credentials are never exposed to your screen device
- Your credentials are encrypted & stored in a secure AWS server
- Your dashboard screenshots are created & deleted every few seconds
There’s another benefit to this method: Fugo is also more reliable than other solutions because as opposed to displaying dashboards on screens directly - which can quickly overload and crash media players - we display a dashboard snapshot which loads quickly and efficiently on any screen device, not just the professional-grade ones.
What are the benefits of TV dashboards?
When you enlist your TV screens to share your data, you open your business up to all kinds of benefits:
- Reach employees at every level and location of your organization, from executives to frontline workers
- Ensure your employees actually see & act on your data
- Have your most critical metrics and KPIs available at a glance
- Free your data with zero licensing issues - all it takes is one user seat to share dashboards to hundreds of screens
Additional features inside Fugo allow you to go beyond just simply displaying a loop of single dashboards. The TV Dashboards feature itself employs a screen-capturing tool for you to select certain portions of your dashboards to highlight on your displays.
A flexible content design studio allows you to pull and display data from multiple sources simultaneously by splitting up your screen. You can also create an embedded channel for your teams to view dashboards in other tools like Notion, Slack, or on internal websites.
From the founders:
“This has been our most requested feature by far, and we dug really deep to find the best possible solution to this problem,” Chesham says. "The result is TV dashboards that are reliable, stable, and secure. It’s our hope that businesses will find that Fugo allows them to scale out and kind of democratize their data so that it becomes the organizational resource it was intended to be.”
To read more about Secure TV Dashboards and get yourself started, you can visit our site here - https://www.fugo.ai/tv-dashboards/
As we like to say at Fugo - happy publishing!
