data

Microsoft Secure Score Shows Effectiveness of Data Security

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Microsoft Secure Score

Microsoft Secure Score Shows Effectiveness of Data Security   A current hot topic of conversation in the technology world is safety and security – and for good reason. It often feels as though we are constantly being warned of new scams or online threats. Remaining diligent is essential, especially when it comes to your organization’s data. The Microsoft Secure Score is an effective way to measure the quality of your organization’s protection policies.  What is the Microsoft Secure Score? The Microsoft Secure Score is a tool available in the M365 security portal that helps you measure and improve your organization’s security tactics in Microsoft 365.   It gives you a numerical summary … Read more

Secret Manager to Protect Sensitive Data in App Development

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Secret Manager

Secret Manager to Protect Sensitive Data in App Development   How you deal with sensitive data is critical to your organization’s success. If you are not careful with sensitive company or client data, you risk losing trust between you and your employees or customer base. But how do you protect sensitive data when developing a new application where you may need access to said data? Secret Manager provides a solution for protecting sensitive data during application development.  What is Secret Manager?  Secret Manager is used to store sensitive data during the development of an ASP.NET Core application development project. It keeps the “secrets” out of the source code and stores them … Read more

Modern DevOps Practices Lead to Better App Functionality 

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A leading Canadian retail logistics provider contacted Imaginet for a variety of application support. Broadly speaking, they needed assistance in managing several applications that had been written in the old .Net framework. These applications were poorly documented and lacked standardized build processes. Modernizing the applications was necessary as was breaking the larger applications down into smaller ones. This would make them more testable and would allow the client the track any in-application issues. In short, our client needed to adopt modern DevOps practices.    What We Did   The client had one massive application that, among other functions, primarily managed the inventory orders coming out and shipments to customers. There were roughly … Read more

Custom Application Streamlines Production and Reduces Costs

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food contacted Imaginet to complete and polish a custom application started by a few interns. The application was not as far along as they initially thought, and they needed support.   The App:  In summer 2023, the interns visited all the facilities to understand how they handle the production of their “meat mix” pet food. The facilities where the product is made are separate from the supplier locations. At this time, they were tracking products via a spreadsheet – a method prone to error. Per year, 10,000 tankers haul the meat mix product to and from the supplier locations, and this … Read more

Inventory Reporting Tool Optimizes Inventory and Delivery with Data Integration

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A provider of bedding plants for vegetable and herb gardens contacted Imaginet because they were starting to use Go Spot Check and wanted to bring its data into their data warehouse. Go Spot Check is a third-party cloud application that, like many supplementary tools, offers reporting in-app but doesn’t have a reliable or repeatable export method for the raw data. These types of tools can be very useful to organizations but can cause challenges when attempting to retrieve and integrate the data they collect. In this case, our client was in need of an inventory reporting tool. They specifically mentioned their desire to use the Go Spot Check data in collaboration … Read more

Power BI Reports & DevOps Component Improves Data Quality

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A major Canadian University had been experiencing issues with discrepancies in their data reports. They had an existing data warehouse across the entire organization, but the data quality was poor and inaccurate. Therefore, they were in need of a solution that could provide overall improved data quality. The client had expressed their desire to keep the data warehouse currently in place. We determined that data collected and presented in Power BI reports would satisfy the client’s data needs.   What We Did: Power BI  We started by doing work in Power BI that allowed the reports to match up with their evaluation criteria, which involved working heavily in SQL. We then … Read more

Microsoft Fabric: OneLake Provides a Unified Data Lake  

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Microsoft Fabric

Have you been hearing the buzz about Microsoft Fabric?   The Data Engineering and Business Intelligence team at Imaginet has been watching with interest the development of Fabric since it was announced in March 2023. As data professionals with deep expertise in the Microsoft stack of data analytics products, we’ve already been using many of the pieces of Fabric and we’re excited to see how they are evolving.  Microsoft Fabric brings together several data products into a more unified experience, including Azure Synapse for querying data sources, Azure Data Factory for performing ETL processes (Extract, Transform, Load), and Power BI for showing data in dashboard or paginated forms. These products have … Read more

Centralized Data Reporting Reduces Wait Times and Improves Reliability

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food contacted Imaginet because the data for their health and safety reporting was slow and failing to load properly. They were working with an online platform called Evotix and pulling data from a web URL to build reports. Additionally, they have numerous factories and therefore have high volumes of data to capture. Each of the factories was attempting to take the data from the Evotix platform to build reports but the web URL couldn’t handle many factories requesting large datasets concurrently and was consequently unreliable. They were in need of a centralized data repository, so all their data could be accessible … Read more