Security is our number one priority. Bime is an analytical tool, not a database – uploading data can ease collaboration and boost performance but is not actually necessary. Déjà Vu, our distributed cache, exists to enhance user experience and performance, but the user is in no way obliged to use it. Data is only stored in the Cloud upon user request, otherwise it is extracted from the user database each time.

Reliable, secure server environment

When Déjà Vu, our distributed cache, is activated, Bime will mutualize the data from your computer directly to Amazon S3 without going through our servers. The transfer is encrypted, the request is signed using a public and private key mechanism. Data is stored in a proprietary format, encrypted and anonymized.

All of our servers are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale datacenters. This experience has been applied to the AWS platform and infrastructure. AWS datacenters are housed in nondescript facilities. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state of the art intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means.

Authorized staff must pass two-factor authentication a minimum of two times to access datacenter floors. All visitors and contractors are required to present identification and are signed in and continually escorted by authorized staff. AWS only provides datacenter access and information to employees and contractors who have a legitimate business need for such privileges. When an employee no longer has a business need for these privileges, his or her access is immediately revoked, even if they continue to be an employee of Amazon or Amazon Web Services. All physical access to datacenters by AWS employees is logged and audited routinely. AWS requires that staff with potential access to customer data undergo an extensive background check (as permitted by law) commensurate with their position and level of access to data.

Serious about data security

Another element of high importance is certification. Bime has passed the independent security review by SalesForce.com, which has some of the highest standards in the industry, without any flaws.

As we do not maintain our own data systems or servers, we are not eligible for a SaS type II audit. All of the systems we use are hosted by Amazon Web Services, which of course does hold SaS Type II accreditation.

Don’t forget: All Bime accounts include 128-bit SSL security – the same used by online banks. SSL is an acronym for “Secure Socket Layer”, a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows Bime to securely communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or communications forgery. It is the same technology used by e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com to keep your information safe and secure during transactions. In Bime’s case, SSL keeps your data connections absolutely secure (Bime’s normal password protection keeps your information private, but SSL keeps it private and secure). Even the free trial has SSL on all Bime connections!

And remember: Your data is yours! We don’t store it. We only store the way you want to analyze it. We connect your data and act like a middle-man who gives you more insight into it. Whereas your data is stored in the Cloud, in your computer or in your internal server, we rely on your datastore capabilities.

Do I really need such a high level of security?

Not all of our customers need this much security… But that’s the benefit of Cloud BI — you will always get the level of protection needed by the provider’s most stringent customer’s requirements. And what’s more – you don’t even have to pay a premium for it!

How are you able to access analytics data – do you have a relationship with google or do users have to provide access? How private is our data in your hands?

Here is our answer:

You need a Google account with at least one website listed in Google Analytics in order to access your data using Bime. We use the Google API to access this data.

Security is our number one priority. We take all reasonable precautions to keep your information safe and secure. We don’t store your data. We only store the way you want to analyze it. All Bime accounts include 128-bit SSL security – the same used by online banks. Whereas your data is stored in the cloud, in your computer or in your internal server, we rely on your datastore capabilities to access and perform analysis on this data.

I hope that answered your questions. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any more, or want to explore Bime further. We’d be happy to set up a free trial account for you.

We picked out 5 random things that you should know about Bime to give you a little overview of its capabilities.

1. You don’t have to be an IT whizz to use Bime.

Yes, believe it or not, not everyone that uses Bime is an IT pro. In fact, it’s almost the opposite – Bime is designed to empower professionals outside of the IT department, with a view to freeing up IT demand so that IT departments can focus solely on their strategic IT role. There is no hardware, no software to install, no deployment and no manual update. And because Bime has been designed for normal people, only meaningful design features are available; not because we don’t care, but because less is more: beautiful visual design meets effortless functionality.

2. We give you Bime for free.

Well, for the first month anyway. Whether you later intend on opening a paid account or not, we’ll always start you off with 30 days at no cost to you. This is to give you a chance to explore the fully-functional Enterprise version of Bime and work out how it can benefit you and your business, with no obligation to upgrade. So what have you got to lose? Open a new account here.

3. There is a desktop version of Bime.

You never stop hearing about the benefits of the SaaS version of Bime, but we also offer Bime Desktop. Bime Desktop is the same application (same look and feel, same features as your online version of Bime) but it can connect on-premise data such as your personal Excel files or your organizational databases (such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostGre, Access…).

What’s so great about it? You can use the same account and login that you use for the online version of Bime. Every query, dashboard and new connection you created in the cloud is available in your desktop application. Both the desktop and SaaS version will give you exactly the same views and navigation options.

Bime Desktop allows you to gather on-premise data AND cloud data in the same dashboards. For example: On the one hand: you have budgeted your marketing campaign using Excel. On the other hand: you use Google Analytics to analyze it. Now, you can create a dashboard with both sets of information in one place!

You can load Bime desktop here.

4. Your data is secure and we don’t store it.

Your data is yours. We don’t store it. We only store the way you want to analyze it – in this way, Bime acts like a connection. This is called metadata. Your metadata and information related to your account is backed up each day.

All Bime accounts include 128-bit SSL security. What is SSL? SSL is an acronym for “Secure Socket Layer”, a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows Bime to securely communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or communications forgery. It is the same technology used by banks and e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com to keep your information safe and secure during transactions. In Bime’s case, SSL keeps your data connections absolutely secure (Bime’s normal password protection keeps your information private, but SSL keeps it private and secure). Even the free version has SSL on all Bime connections.

All of our servers are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale datacenters. This experience has been applied to the AWS platform and infrastructure. AWS datacenters are housed in nondescript facilities. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state of the art intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means.

5. You can analyze your Google Analytics data at a highly detailed level.

As you may or may not be aware, in Bime’s last couple of releases, the focus has been heavily on the Google Analytics Connector. Not only can you drill right down into your Google Analytics data, but you can now also analyze several profiles at the same time with profile aggregation – a feature which is super useful for comparing your different websites. Previously you had to analyze each separate website, then export your data, collate it.. let’s just say, Bime now does all the hard work for you, freeing you up to focus on other more important things – such as how you are going to use your newly-found insight to improve your website traffic.

What else? Dynamic Segmentation was one of the top new features deployed by Google in their API. With Bime 1.97 you’ll get full support when it comes to segmentation.

Update 15/09/2010: Check out Bime v1.99, it’s even better and faster than v1.97!

We would love to hear your thoughts about Bime. What do you like? What don’t you like? What do you think we could improve on? Feel free to post your opinions as a comment below!

The recent report released by Gartner says all cloud services customers should have some basic rights to protect their interests. We’ll briefly outline their ideas :

What are your rights as the consumer?

1. The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data

Service consumers should retain ownership and rights to their own data. The provider must specify exactly what it can do with the consumer’s data and any contract must provide for the clear disposition of the service consumer’s data, in the case that the provider can no longer provide service.

2. The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes

All computing services suffer slowdowns and failures at some point along the line. However, cloud services providers rarely commit to recovery times or spell out details of the remediation process. The provider’s contract should not simply guarantee an x amount of turnaround time; it should really specify how it plans to deliver the remedy.

3. The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes

Every service provider needs at some point to interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. However they should give advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and grant the consumer some control over the timing of the switch.

4. The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front

A lot of service providers fail to fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations, leaving consumers at risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment. To save problems in the long-run for both parties, both service consumers and providers must do a better job of keeping each other informed about their technical limitations, particularly for complex, long-term projects.

5. The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates

If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about. Service providers should explain which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must therefore meet. The consumer needs reassurance that the provider is not violating any rules for which the consumer may be held accountable.

6. The right to know what security processes the provider follows

Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not compromise security at another level (such as the network). Service consumers also need to understand the provider’s business continuity plans, so that they can ensure that their own operations continue in the case of an emergency.

What is your responsibility as the consumer?

You have the responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements…

Providers and consumers must reach an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured. On one hand, providers must not be held liable if the consumer violates the licensing agreement by putting the software it licenses from a third party in the cloud. On the other hand, the provider should not agree to an audit directly by the vendor, if the consumer owns the software licenses.

So, to quickly sum up all of the above.. As Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow says : “Respecting these rights will require effort and expense from providers, but securing the rights will encourage enterprises to put more of their business into the cloud”. Here at We Are Cloud we think these are all valid points, which is why we strive to be as transparent as possible, and we do everything we can to honor the rights of our customers.

5 trends we have identified in the BI and Data Visualization world this year are:

1. Growth of the Data Warehousing Market

Recently we’ve seen a trend toward consolidation and building a centralized enterprise data warehouse. As a result, a massive modernization drive intended to improve overall decision-making is now taking place. Within the past year, data warehousing solutions have continued to become more and more popular because of their high levels of performance, ability to incorporate analytics, and their integration within larger BI platforms. As the costs of space and processing speed become lower, vendors can give organizations more powerful offerings but with lower price tags. This has helped to expand the use of data warehouses within organizations, both by the number of companies adopting data warehouses, and by the types of applications that can be used.

2. Social Media for BI

Providers are slowly integrating social networking functions into their solutions. Customers are beginning to expect rich interactive experiences that mimic their internet use, and BI can match these expectations if it draws on the information from interactions that occur in social computing environments. Due to the ability to create powerful interactions and improve ease of use, more providers are focusing on developments that mimic social media and Web 2.0 interactions. In doing so, the role of BI has become increasingly popular and more widely applied within organizations because of the assumed ease of use.

3. Increased Use of Different Data Sources

The reality of today is that in order to stay ahead of competitors, companies are required to integrate various information sources to get additional value from their data and a full operational view of the organization. Vendors are now developing business-focused applications that take these requirements into account and offer customers a ready-made solution that targets business issues being faced by companies within different markets.

4. Renewed Focus on Fraud Detection and Security

Because of the amount of media coverage of fraudulent activities, the ability to detect fraud and to maintain a secure environment is an area constantly at the forefront of IT. Organizations are required to make sure that information within the firewall is not left at risk. So as threats against IT security have continued to augment, organizations have been more committed to tightly monitoring their environments and the information within them. Providers have done a good job ensuring security – however, because of increased risk, organizations and vendors alike will focus more on maintaining high level security within their information centers, especially due to all the new forms of data being integrated into analytics platforms.

5. Advanced Data Visualizations

Data visualization offerings keep expanding, and the inclusion of geo-spatial analysis has helped bring analytics to the forefront of visualization. For organizations looking at product, geographical or customer data, the ability to identify trends using maps has helped them to recognize trends a lot faster. Although this technology has been around for a while and is not “new” as such, it is only recently that companies have started to integrate this type of functionality on a regular basis within their overall dashboard use.

The pressure is on!

Within the BI space, constant advancements in technology means trends are always shifting. Depending upon economic and market factors, organizations may not adopt improved offerings from developers. On the other hand, early adopters often look to BI for inspiration on ways in which they can help their business overtake the competition. Overall, 2009 saw many releases within back-end databases and front-end visualizations. On top of this, there has been serious demands for low-cost solutions with quick implementation times, and solution providers are under pressure to improve upon their current products throughout the rest of 2010. Here in Montpellier, we have been continuously updating Bime to bring you all of these things, as well as top-of-the-range features, simplicity of use and a beautiful, clean interface.