Microsoft BI vs Rapid7 InsightVM comparison

Microsoft BI is a business intelligence solution that connects to all your data sources and turns your data into insightful and useful business information that is relevant to all levels of the business, ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and security.

Microsoft BI combines familiar Microsoft tools - Office, SharePoint, and SQL server - with extra features for end-users, such as Power View and Power Pivot. This powerful product gives businesses a competitive advantage by allowing end users to better analyze their data, collaborate, and better present their data.

The BI platform empowers members of your organization to make data-driven decisions that drive strategic actions quickly by allowing them to work together easily on the same data, share insights, and collaborate on reports using other Microsoft Office applications.

Microsoft BI Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Microsoft BI include: 

• Scalability: Easily scale the Microsoft BI platform to help reduce costs and minimize the security risks and complexities that arise as a result of maintaining multiple systems.

• Secure analytics: Protect your data with sophisticated data security features, including sensitivity labeling, end-to-end encryption, and real-time access monitoring. View and share meaningful AI-based insights enriched by data visualizations.

• Regular user-driven innovative updates: Get weekly and monthly updates that improve the capabilities of Power BI based on thousands of ideas submitted each year from a community of over 500,000 members worldwide.

• Seamless integration with Microsoft products: Microsoft BI connects with Microsoft 365, allowing you to create Excel queries, data models, and reports for the Power BI dashboards. These integrations make it easy to collect, analyze, publish, and share Excel business data.

• Access Microsoft BI from any location: BI can be accessed at any time from anywhere using its mobile app, allowing ease of access to distributed teams or businesses across many locations. The business intelligence platform also enables teams to work on any file at the same time.

• User-friendly dashboard: View and manage your data in a user-friendly and intuitive customized dashboard. The Microsoft BI platform enables teams to work independently while exchanging analytics between different departments and users. With Microsoft BI, you can easily create personalized dashboards that combine on-premises and cloud data into a single view, allowing you to monitor enterprise data from multiple business applications.

• Easy installation: Install the platform in minutes just by creating an API key and inputting it into the software.

Reviews from Real Users

Microsoft BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its integration options and its data analytics capabilities.

Tariq R., an operations & BI analyst at American Hospital Dubai, writes, “Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis. ”

Rapid7 InsightVM is a comprehensive vulnerability management platform that protects your systems from attackers and is easy to scale. The solution provides easy access to vulnerability management, application security, detection and response, external threat intelligence, orchestration and automation, and more. Rapid7 InsightVM is ideal for security, IT, and DevOps teams, helping them reduce risk by enabling them to detect and respond to attacks quickly.

Rapid7 InsightVM Features

Rapid7 InsightVM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Automated containment: With this feature, you can decrease exposure from vulnerabilities by automatically implementing temporary (or permanent) compensating controls via your network access control (NAC) systems, firewalls, and endpoint detection and response tools.

• Policy assessment: Rapid7 InsightVM offers pre-built scan templates for common compliance requirements. The solution helps you take clear, actionable steps to compliance once you have assessed your risk posture. In addition, Rapid7 InsightVM’s Custom Policy Builder allows you to modify existing benchmarks or create new policies from scratch.

• REST API: Rapid7 InsightVM REST API is easy to use and was built to easily automate virtually any aspect of vulnerability management, from data collection to risk analysis.

• Live dashboards: Rapid7 InsightVM includes dashboards that are live and interactive by nature. The live dashboards enable you to create custom cards and full dashboards for anyone in your organization and allow you to track progress of your security program.

• Automation-assisted patching: Rapid7 InsightVM’s automation-assisted patching gives you the autonomy to make key decisions in your patching process, such as your approval to apply certain patches to certain vulnerabilities.

• Real risk prioritization: Rapid7 InsightVM makes it simple to know which vulnerabilities need to be prioritized and where your riskiest assets lie.

• Goals and SLA’s: This feature enables you to make and track progress toward your goals and service level agreements (SLAs) at an appropriate pace.

Rapid7 InsightVM Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Rapid7 InsightVM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Attack surface monitoring for maintained visibility: By leveraging attack surface monitoring with Project Sonar (a Rapid7 research project that regularly scans the internet to gain insights into global exposure to common vulnerabilities), you can gain more control of all of your external-facing assets, both known and unknown.

• Container security: Rapid7 InsightVM integrates with your CI/CD tools, public container repositories, and private repositories to assess container images for vulnerabilities during the build process even before they are deployed.

• Lightweight endpoint agent: Rapid7 InsightVM unifies data so you only need to install a single agent for continuous vulnerability assessment, incident detection, and log data collection.

• Easily assign and track remediation duties: Using Rapid7 InsightVM, IT and security teams can assign as well as track remediation duties without having to deal with remediation reports, complex spreadsheets, or back-and-forth email tags.

• Integration with cloud services and virtual infrastructure: Rapid7 InsightVM provides full visibility into risk across your physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.

• Integrated threat feeds: Rapid7 InsightVM is designed with integrated threat feeds, giving you a dynamic view that shows you which threats are most relevant to your environment, enabling you to better protect against current, impending threats so you can react quickly to critical vulnerabilities.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Rapid7 InsightVM solution.

An owner at a tech services company says, "I liked the dashboard on it. I could customize my dashboard with different widgets and different heat maps."

PeerSpot user Kimeang S., Technical Consultant at Yip Intsoi, mentions, "The most important aspect of the solution is that it rarely gives false positives, especially compared to other products. It provides very clear reports for our IT teams to look at."

A Director of Information Technology at a government explains, "The main functionality of identifying item endpoints that weren't properly patched or had vulnerabilities is the solution's most valuable feature."