A Guide to Choosing a Secure & Reliable Charting Library

When selecting a charting library for mission-critical applications, security, quality, and long-term reliability should be added to your selection process criteria. This guide outlines key factors companies should evaluate when choosing a charting solution to ensure big data charting cybersecurity.

How to Choose a Secure Charting Library: Top Considerations

When integrating third-party charting libraries, security should be a top priority. That way, you can feel confident that your data apps are compliant and less vulnerable to unauthorized access or performance instability. It ultimately contributes to a reliable data experience for the most time-critical or demanding use cases.

Key security aspects include:

• Avoiding native data input or output, storage, or authentication mechanisms to minimize unauthorized access risks.
• Using proprietary rendering with minimal third-party dependencies to reduce security vulnerabilities.
• Offering access to source code for transparency and independent security audits.
• Integrating security best practices at every stage of development, including manual verification of example applications before release.

Ensuring Code Quality & Reliability

Without the right code, your developers will have a hard time getting your big data visualizations off the ground.

To ensure high-quality code and reliability, a robust charting library should implement over 20,000 unit and integration tests across platforms to maintain stability.

Additionally, automated visual testing can confirm rendering consistency across different devices. For added security and reliability, the team behind a chart library should perform regular manual code reviews, and Git-based version control is also essential.

Security Updates & Patch Management

Regular updates and prompt security patches are vital for maintaining a secure charting solution.

When evaluating a charting library for its cybersecurity credentials, check for both automated and manual vulnerability scans at each development phase. This proactive approach helps detect and address potential issues early on.

Additionally, the library should have a mechanism for publishing updates and security patches outside of standard release cycles when necessary, ensuring prompt responses to emerging threats.

Another important aspect to consider is whether the library uses secure distribution channels, such as NuGet or similar platforms. These channels maintain update integrity and prevent tampering, further enhancing the security of the library.

Business Continuity & Risk Mitigation

To ensure minimal downtime and maximum operational resilience, your charting library provider should have robust business continuity measures in place.

Look for features like geo-redundant backups across multiple platforms to safeguard your data, rapid recovery protocols to get you back up and running quickly, and standby servers to minimize disruptions.

Additionally, DDoS protection and firewall security should be a given, and clear recovery policies for critical services will ensure your operations stay on track in the long run.

Compliance & Regulatory Considerations

We recommend partnering with a library that adheres to secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) principles and adapts to international, national and industry-specific regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

To future-proof your applications and ensure data security, it’s crucial to choose solutions that minimize telemetry collection and are transparent about their data practices.

Opt for libraries that either collect minimal, anonymous telemetry solely for licensing purposes or, ideally, offer air-gapped licensing options that don’t require any data collection.

Prioritize libraries that explicitly state their telemetry policies and avoid those that collect sensitive data from deployed applications.

Keep Your Data Apps Secure with a Charting Solution that Takes Cybersecurity Seriously

Choosing the right charting library requires careful consideration of security, quality, update management, and compliance. A robust solution should follow industry best practices, proactively address vulnerabilities, and ensure business continuity. By evaluating these factors, businesses can confidently integrate a charting library that meets their cybersecurity and operational needs.

Not all charting libraries will be able to offer the extensive cybersecurity measures listed in this article. To explore an example of a charting library that follows these best practices, visit SciChart’s security page. We use our own purpose-built GPU-accelerated rendering engine and provide exceptional support for organizations that require the best data protection, stability and security, including 90% of the leading medical device companies and defense systems for NATO allies.

Discover SciChart’s Cybersecurity