Data Lakes for Smarter Associations

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What is a “data lake”?

Data lake – it’s a big, partially structured and differently structured set of data from your association that you can use to answer interesting questions. Think of it like throwing everything in your pantry into one magical cauldron and it comes back with answers. Of course be careful what you ask, as SECURITY IS ALWAYS JOB 1! But it’s cool.

This is how AWS visualizes it:

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/what-is-a-data-lake/

Having been personally involved in politics, analytics, electrical engineering, programming, robotics, public relations and media strategy not to mention the whole entrepreneurship thing, I must to start with a warning; do NOT go overboard.

Luckily Tendenci as your AMS makes this a whole lot easier with all of the ways to import and export data (or your whole database.) And pretty much every report has a structured export as well, from custom forms, donations, event registrations, memberships, you name it. You have FULL ACCESS to YOUR DATA in both flat files and in the actual database schema. For example:

I like this quote from wipro:

If the data in a lake is not well curated, then it may turn into a data swamp, flooding an organization with information.

https://www.wipro.com/en-US/analytics/five-best-practices-to-keep-your-data-lake-healthy/

You can see more screen shots of the built in reporting within Tendenci. Yet let’s be realistic, you are integrating data from many sources and a Data Lake including but not limited to your data on Tendenci might be just the thing. Contact us for more, because we LOVE DATA!

And we’ve got over 20+ years of experience to back it up.

Why not make 2020 the banner year to grow your membership and donations? Because that’s what we THRIVE ON! YOUR SUCCESS!

Security in the Tendenci SaaS Cloud at AWS

Kibana OSSEC Tendenci

Cyber Security is based on Prevention, Monitoring, and Incident Response

Associations are part of the fabric of society. We take it seriously. And we also understand there are no “perfect” or “completely secure” systems. Not even air-gapped.

To guard our SaaS AMS clients’s sites we use redundant systems. These include SSL encryption, application isolation, containers, layers of AWS (Amazon Web Services) VPC, Security Groups, ACLs, Route53 DNS, custom AMIs, virus scanners, malware scanners, pentesting, auditing and more. All of these activities generate redundant logs which need to be monitored. To do that we run what is called the “ELK Stack” or now the “Elastic Stack“.

Network Monitoring with OSSEC Logstash ElasticSearch and Kibana

Cyber Security starts with Project Management

A Cyber PM, upon initial completion, never ends. It requires constant vigilance. The process of Cyber Security can be further explained as:

  1. Architecture – Start with Security In Mind
  2. Passive Cyber Defense – Systems that are in place
  3. Active Cyber Defense
  4. Cyber Intelligence Gathering
  5. Response

** Note: There is a longer explanation on our site at https://www.tendenci.com/security/

There are many resources available for cyber security training. We encourage you to look them up and take an active role in keeping your web site, company, family and country secure from cyber attacks!

For the expanded full version of the basics of cyber security in the Tendenci SaaS cloud, view at https://www.tendenci.com/security