Introducing the COVID-19 Data Science Dashboard Case Study

Written by Samir Souidi, Cloud Security Alliance - New Jersey Chapter

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, cloud-enabled and open-access health data resources have been created and provided by federal agencies and public and private entities. These initiatives have accelerated the adaptation of data science to extract public knowledge and answer complex questions on large-scale issues.

A case study article by the CSA New Jersey Chapter outlines the steps taken in creating a prototype data science visualization dashboard related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The dashboard displays response data points by using a cloud solution with five Application Programming Interface (API) connectors from different public data sources.

Power BI Software

While building the dashboard, the Power BI software solution allowed us to do transformation and data modeling and to create and build a relational dataset between the different public data sources. Power BI is an online cloud software service (SaaS) offering from Microsoft that lets you easily and quickly create self-service business intelligence dashboards, reports, datasets, and visualizations with a user-friendly interface. The Power BI service is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, and it is built under the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) to address security compliance requirements.

Open Data

With the COVID-19 pandemic, it became important to use open data to tackle a global issue with collective efforts. Using the cloud and modern software tools, we can expedite the use of these open data sources and offer unprecedented benefits and quality in agility, economy, and resiliency. The need for cybersecurity and information security to protect these resources becomes a public interest and an obligation.

Key Takeaways From the Article

Our case study document will tell you:

• How using cloud-enabled and open data makes knowledge on large-scale issues accessible and understandable
• How Power BI was used to do transformation and data modeling and to create a relational dataset
• The challenges involved with using Power BI
• How cloud security provisions, such as anonymized data, were used in the dashboard
• What the setup of the COVID-19 cloud-enabled web portal looks like

Download the full article, Cloud Solution Data Science COVID-19 Dashboard, to learn more.