Today, Google made a couple of really interesting announcements around data visualization. First of all, the open wire protocol and secondly the Secure Data Connector. In addition, Salesforce announced that they added a number of new Google Visualizations to the Google Visualization API.
The Google Visualization API is a way to embed mainly static visualizations into your Web site. You have to write code, but it’s not too complicated. Many people are using the API to add simple charts to their Web sites, without the need of any third-party chart libraries or alike. Now, what do all the announcements of today mean? Let’s look at the one from Salesforce. They updated Google Visualizations. The benefits of having new visualizations is fairly obvious. Users have more possibilities to visualize their data. Secondly, it shows that there are companies out there that are using the Google visualization APIs, which is good from a support and adoption point of view.
The availability of the Open Wire Protocol is interesting because it finally provides a way to use the visualizations not just with Google Spreadsheet data, but any data that you have. This will most likely mean that we will see a number of new Web sites and services that are making use of the Google Visualization API. I am curious whether some security folks will pick it up to generate some interesting security visualizations. The Secure Data Connector is the third announcement. Google realized that some customers have data behind their firewall. They dont’t want to or cannot open up an unsecured channel to make that data available to people that are outside of the corporate boundaries. SDC is a way to allow users to deal with this problem in a secure mannar.
All in all, these developments show that visualization is a very hot topic. But, what does this mean for security visualization? I hope that the availability of more and more free components will inspire people to implement and experiment with novel and fun ways to look at security data. Hopefully this all will lower the hurdle for people to enter the security visualization playground.
Contact: Raffael Marty Twitter: @zrlram
Raffy’s Recent Blog Posts:
- Data Visualization with Treemaps – A hands-on Tutorial
- Information Visualization Process
- The Tools I Use to Visualize Data
