Business Intelligence and What Mobile Security Has to Do with It

We are a security Cat, specializing in mobile application security. You know that. In the last couple of months, we happened to stumble onto another tech domain: Business Intelligence (BI). If you’re curious about the story of how we got there, check out this short “Impossible Cat and BI” video.

For those who are new to BI, the term Business Intelligence has various meanings. It is a tool, system or technique used to transform raw data into useful information for business analysis purpose. BI allows an organization to collect, store, analyze and access data to gain understanding of past and present state and make predictions of the future.

Common functions of BI you might already know are analytics, reporting, business performance management or text mining. BI software applications range from common applications like Excel, Access to heavyweight database software from IBM or Oracle.

Here are a few things you can do with BI:

• Get complete insight of customer behavior to improve product development for targeted customers.
• Increase process visibility to determine if any component of your organization needs improvement.
• Determine patterns and key trends in your business data and make connections between various areas of your organization.

Thus, executing business intelligence techniques efficiently helps organization to improve decision-making, strategic and tactical management processes.
Since insight and decision-making are essential for BI, would it make sense that people should be able to have access to these insights whenever and wherever they want? We all know that hallelujah moment normally doesn’t happen often when we want it to happen, not least by the office desk. It is the same when you need to make important decisions.

Thanks to the influx of mobile devices, Business Intelligence, too, has embarked on its own mobile journey and since then grown rapidly. While the bulk of BI activities need to be done by the desk due to heavy data set and memory hungry nature of BI, users can now access business insights on their smartphones and tablets. Mobile BI optimizes traditional desktop analysis reports so that information can be decently viewed on small screen devices. Now that BI has gone mobile, what’s next?

An important characteristic of BI lies in the bulk of its sensitive, private data about a business. Let's assume that it is your business would you want that information to be compromised easily?

When this information is made available via BI mobile apps, would you also want to do that in a secure way, not compromising information and business systems in any way.

It’s what we want, but the reality is different. According to a report done by security vendor Arxan “studying 230 top apps, top 100 Paid apps on Android and iOS and found that 92% of iOS apps have been hacked,with this rising to an incredible 100% on the Android platform.”

That is why mobile security, precisely mobile app security, has everything to do with Business Intelligence. And we will address it in later posts.

Need any help with integration security to your mobile BI solution, shout out ot us at info@teskalabs.com or tweet to us @TeskaLabs.