Today, companies must provide information to users in a way they can understand. They must generate reports with reliable data that visually represent their commercial efforts.
Data-driven companies want to democratize access to relevant data in their organizations and empower their employees to get answers quickly. On one hand, companies want to create a single shared source of truth, with granular control of data access and secure centralized storage. While we realize that these capabilities are necessary to take our business to the next level, we must also think about whether these tools are reliable and have the necessary degree of security.
Companies today are looking for BI solutions that can be easily used by all members of an organization (both technical and non-technical) while producing real-time metrics.
Google understands this need, and that is why last April it announced its intention to integrate its Looker and Data Studio tools to offer companies a unified experience for self-service, well-governed BI.
Thanks to this integration, users will now be able to access and import governed data from Looker within the Data Studio interface, and create visualizations and dashboards for additional self-service analysis.
This union allows us to offer a better Google Cloud BI experience to our users. Business users will feel more empowered than ever, while data leaders will be able to preserve the trust and security their organization needs.
Looker and Data Studio: better together
Looker and Data Studio are complementary tools. The union of Looker and Data Studio opens exciting opportunities to combine the strengths of both products and a wide range of BI and analytics capabilities to help clients reimagine the way they work with data.
Looker is a modern enterprise platform for business intelligence and analytics, helping organizations create data-rich experiences tailored to every part of their business. Data Studio is an easy-to-use, self-service BI solution that enables ad hoc reporting, analysis, and data blending across more than 500 data sets.
How will the integration work?
According to Google Cloud, this first integration between these products will allow users to connect to Looker’s semantic model directly from Data Studio.
Users can bring the data they want to analyze, connect it to other available data sources, and easily explore and create visualizations within Data Studio. The integration will follow three principles with respect to governance:
- Access to the data will be carried out having the capabilities using Looker’s security measures.
- Looker will remain the single point of access to your data.
- Administrators will have full ability to manage Data Studio and Looker in an integrated manner.
How is Google integrating these products?
Looker’s semantic model allows metrics to be centrally defined and widely used, ensuring a single version of the truth across all your data. This integration allows Looker’s semantic model to be used within Data Studio reports, allowing people to use the same tool to create reports that are based on both ad-hoc and governed data. This brings together the best of both worlds: a governed data layer and a self-service solution that enables the analysis of governed and ungoverned data.
With this announcement, the following use cases will be supported:
- Users can turn their Looker-driven data into informative and highly customizable dashboards and reports in Data Studio.
- Users can combine Looker’s governed data with data available from more than 500 data sources in Data Studio, to rapidly generate new insights.
- Users can quickly analyze and prototype raw data—from spreadsheets, CSV files, or other cloud sources—within Data Studio.
- Users can collaborate in real-time to create dashboards with teammates or people outside the company.
When will this integration be available for use?
This integration is the first of many in Google’s effort to bring Looker and Data Studio closer together. Future versions will introduce additional features to create a more seamless user experience for these two products.
In short, Google will implement new capabilities in the coming months. So, don’t miss any Making Science articles as we will be publishing all the news on this topic.
Do you want to know more about the Looker + Data Studio integration and the benefits it can bring to your online business? Our team of experts will be happy to attend to your specific case. Get in touch today!
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