Frequently asked questions

Decision Intelligence (DI) combines human decision making with Business Intelligence and Machine Learning. Toustone DI is made up of four components; Single Souce of Truth, Automated Reporting, Data Story Telling, and Machine Learning. Our solutions along with industry expertise enable us to integrate and automate the entire reporting process and display it in a visual dashboard for easy and effective insights. This accelerates operational performance through better data and better decisions.

Your data is hosted on a secure AWS Cloud, Toustone environment and Yellowfin’s proven architecture. Your hosting solutions comes with a highly skilled support team that monitors your reporting environment 24×7 with automated alerting on service outages, performance degradation and security threats.

Toustone’s hosting solution is cloud-based, so, scaling happens on-demand – if you need more resources, you can get more resources in minutes.

The speed of the environment is very much determined by three factors, (1) the speed of the underlying data source, (2) the amount of data being processed for each report and (3) the number of users accessing the system concurrently. With regards to 1, we can supply and architect a high speed data warehouse to ensure queries respond in super fast times and can scale to your user load. With regards to 2 our consultants are trained to generate the insights and visualisations with the minimum amount of front end data processing to keep reports responding as fast as possible. With regards to 3 we can easily scale our environments to suit your peak concurrent user requirements.

Yes, your data is encrypted at rest and in transit with industry best practice encryption technologies. Your environment is backed up regularly and our cloud platform has alerting and monitoring in place to ensure performance and detect against potential security threats.

Within the reporting environment very fine grained access can be setup, with every report being able to be placed in a content folder and a user or group being able to be set on those folders. There is also the option to setup data row level security by linking user details directly with the source data.

There are several ways we can extract your data, it will come down to a discussion with the provider to agree on the best technical approach.

Decision Intelligence has evolved from Business Intelligence to deliver more effective decisions and better business outcomes. Where Business Intelligence tools enable data-driven decisions, Decision Intelligence goes beyond that to combine the cause and effect of a decision to determine the best outcome. Basically, DI is BI but with the incorporation of predictive capabilities to support more effective decisions.

Here at Toustone, we are always looking at cutting edge ways to improve our service. The growth from Business Intelligence (BI) to Decision Intelligence (DI) links to the integration of Machine Learning (ML). ML is integrated into an existing BI data model where it learns of the data as it is processed. This enables more accurate predictions of future business behaviours and automates some decisions for you. The change puts more focus on enhancing the decision-making process for better results, hence the shift from “Business” to “Decision” Intelligence.

Yellowfin is our visualisation integration partner. They supply a beautiful analytic experience over a Toustone solid data foundation. Together we deliver a drillable dashboard experience that enables you to easily make quick decisions for your business.

Yes we can. We have various tools that allow us to quickly setup extracts from any number of on premise or cloud data sources and securely ingest that data into a high speed analytics data warehouse where that data can be cleansed, transformed, and then reported on and analysed. Working proof of concepts can often be completed in a couple of weeks. Complete solutions and rollouts will vary in time depending on the number of data sources involved and the overall requirements.

Yes, with a potential firewall change on your network our reporting environment can be setup to securely connect to your database. If there is a JDBC compliant driver for your data source and it can be accessed over the internet we can setup a connection. If your data source happens to be hosted in AWS a more private link can be established to prevent the need for access via the internet.

Very easy with training, we will create the data model for you, so you have all your dimensions etc and it becomes more drag and drop report creation.