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Data centers grow annually by about forty percent, and those for industries such as healthcare, energy, and transportation are growing even faster. However, making data openly available with the use of the cloud can create security threats and opportunities for threat actors. Despite these dangers, many people and organizations benefit from the availability of open data. It can be a useful tool for tackling a global issue, which we have seen with the eagerness for information on the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, as open data centers are an increasingly important method for disseminating critical information, the need for cybersecurity to secure these resources has become a public interest and an obligation.

This brief case study article by CSA’s New Jersey Chapter outlines the steps taken to create a prototype data science dashboard for data points related to the global COVID-19 pandemic response. These data points include global infection cases, deaths, testing, and vaccine administration by country, state, and region. This document also outlines how the prototype was securely built using cloud solutions, which ultimately expedite the development of these valuable resources.

Key Takeaways:

• How using cloud-enabled and open data makes knowledge on large-scale issues accessible and understandable
• How Power BI, an online software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from Microsoft, 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