KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform (discontinued) vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is well suited for a company that knows what they're doing compliance wise and needs to save time doing it. It won't be something you can spend a few hours on and then put on autopilot. It was made to create a rhythm within your own team, and you'll need to have the buy-in. It's useful for IT and Legal teams that already have a vendor risk management process, but want to have a better handle on it. Giving an outside auditor read-only access to a scope is also a huge time saver.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• Mapping controls across different compliance frameworks. It saves you a ton of time and energy!
• Performing risk assessments at the granularity that you prefer, splitting assessments across departments and teams if you wish.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Vendor management has a few kinks to work out. We want to be able to do internal questionnaires for vendors as a compliance checklist before we sign off on a contract. Nothing in the works yet, but there are a few workarounds.
• The navigation between different tasks in scope is clunky, and it's easy to lose your place, and it forces you back to the main page of the scope to retrace your steps.

Incentivized

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

Support from KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is always great. It's always in-house localized support, with excellent response times, and dedicated Customer Success Managers to answer the bulk of your questions or take your suggestions and make them a feature request. They will also reach out at least quarterly and do health checks to make sure you're using the platform to the best of your ability.

Incentivized

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

Quantivate and Fusion were the other two options we checked out. The quantity was high, and a good bit more expensive, but it was the best performing with its platform. They also had more modules that each cost extra to add to your subscription. KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform was all-in-one and a little less mature, but the better buy. Fusion was hard to follow in the demo, and I was not overly impressed. I may have made my decision early enough in the demo to not pay much more attention to it.

Incentivized

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

• Just having the capacity to do things the right way, and formally, has driven some of our compliance efforts.
• Due to licensing limitations, we likely overspent on seats to the platform that we didn't need but also didn't want to miss out on.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized