Security is crucial when working with Tableau extensions. While these extensions can access the visible and the underlying data in a dashboard, they can also communicate with other applications and services hosted anywhere in the world, potentially transferring the data outside the company. Large corporations often do not allow such extensions to be enabled in their Tableau environments. To address this, Tableau introduced sandboxed extensions that run in a protected environment. This completely eliminates the risk of data exfiltration, but these extensions cannot access reliable and beneficial external resources either, resulting in lack of functionality and a much less useful extension.
Starschema’s Secure Extension Gallery for Tableau bridges the gap between the fully opened network-enabled extensions and the very restrictive sandboxed extensions. With Secure Extension Gallery, a company can build a Tableau extension gallery of approved extensions that can be configured to only communicate with trusted external resources. An approval workflow can ensure that only authorized individuals can perform actions in the gallery, and provides additional security. This approach ensures robust security without compromising the functionality of trusted Tableau extensions.
