UTILISING POWER BI FOR CYBER VULNERABILITY ALERT REPORTING

An IT demand recently arisen to support in building and maintaining an interactive report that outlines quarterly cyber security vulnerability alerts so customers can easily break down and analyse each vulnerability, their key metrics and CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) ID's.

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence tool that transforms raw data into interactive dashboards, reports and visual insights for decision-making. Due to my graduate placements in Digitalisation, Strategy and Innovation units, I've been heavily exposed and certified to Power BI for many use cases. Due to my heavy exposure, I was very keen to use Power BI for this demand. 

I was able to quickly import raw excel data stored in a Microsoft OneDrive repository to a Power BI report, and set up a daily file refresh, meaning amendments to the source file were updated in the report daily at 7:00am. 


See figure 1, a snapshot (with confidential information covered) of one of the report pages. The page is interactive in many ways. It includes pre-defined filters for publish data and vulnerability priority. Additionally, if you click one of the columns (or multi-select with ctrl), the data counts at the bottom of the report automatically adjust. Finally, I implemented a colour scale to rank overall vulnerability score by volatility. 

In conclusion, why did I use Power BI, instead of a trusted vulnerability management system?

  1. Power BI is free to build and access within my organisation, whereas trusted vulnerability management systems can be expensive. 
  2. Power BI can quickly ingest data from spreadsheets, APIs, or CSV exports without complex integrations.
  3. Power BI excels at dashboards and interactive reporting, making it easy to present trends and severity breakdowns. 
  4. For a small project, the overhead of deploying and maintaining a full vulnerability management system (e.g., Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7) was not justified.

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