Enhancing Data Privacy: A Visionary Approach Using Tableau on a Private Linux Server

This is my first blog for Data Visualization using Tableau. Ever imagined the security of data used for visualization? There are numerous sources of data used to gather insights, such as xlxs, csv, json, txt, pdf, SQL Server, Oracle, Redshift, etc. In the real-world scenario, organizations (Financial, Government Bodies, Defense Sector, Insurance, Movies, Stock, E-commerce) never wanted their critical and sensitive data exposed to their employees’ systems. But if the end goal is data visualization with full privacy, how can it be achieved?

The easiest way is to imagine a remote Windows Server where Tableau is installed. However, accessing the Tableau application on a Windows machine by the data engineer incurs additional security threat especially if the server has critical dependencies across the organization. This impacts performance and poses a risk of exposing server data.

To address this, I propose implementing Tableau as a web service on a private Linux server. The advantages include Tableau implementation based on a User Authentication model, control of user access privileges by administrative teams, monitoring of system logs by the IT team to track engineer activities, and preventing direct access to the server by data engineers. Data files may be distributed locally on the server, S3 buckets, cloud databases, or other applications. Updates related to Tableau can be added through a secure firewall without risking data.

Components to achieve this include a private Amazon EC2 Instance with Load Balancer, Auto Scaling Group, and integration with Certificate Manager for domain names, ensuring security in VPC and highly availablility with appropriate IAM roles. IAM roles facilitate access to S3 buckets and databases. Files like xlxs, csv, json, txt, pdf can be pushed directly to S3, and the database endpoint can be accessed through the private server. Server installation details as well as costing will be added in my next blog.

Ref :

“Tableau Server.” Tableau, www.tableau.com/products/server.

“Get Started with Tableau Server on Linux.” Tableau Help, Tableau Software, help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/get_started_server.htm.