Harness the Power of Data with Microsoft Azure

21 Apr Harness the Power of Data with Microsoft Azure

Posted at 07:00h in Azure by Simon Spencer

In this article, we’re going to go over how you can use Microsoft Azure to fully take advantage of the power of data throughout your organisation. We’ll also take a look at how you can get started today!

The Power of Data

Like anything else in the world, data is a resource which is generated through the application and research of business intelligence. Data is collected and stored for the use of an entity — whether an individual or organisation — when making decisions down the line.

Every single decision that a business makes is based on data. When considering the number of decisions that need to be made in an average day throughout any organisation, it becomes apparent that for any business — data is a highly valuable resource.

Data is, however, getting smarter. With machine learning and artificial intelligence taking over the business landscape, the data that businesses and corporations need to access is getting more and more powerful by the minute.

With cloud-based services such as Azure making AI implementation much easier for businesses around the world, data is becoming one of the key tenets of any successful business.

Without using the modern tools available to ensure that your data is both highly qualitative and accurate, you risk making suboptimal decisions or even poor-quality choices for your organisation.

Microsoft Azure Data Analytics Services

Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is a data integration service that allows you to make data-driven workflows within the cloud. Its automation tools help with orchestrating and planning data movement and data transformation within your institution.

This means that the tool is completely focused on creating and integrating workflows into the rest of your infrastructure, to orchestrate the movement of your data between data stores. It also lets you monitor and manage workflows using programmatic and UI mechanisms.

You can utilise ADF to —

Support data migration within your organisation.
Get data from an on-prem client’s server to an Azure Data Lake.
Carry out data integration processes.
Integrate data from multiple ERP sources and utilise it within Azure Synapse for reporting.

Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks is used to build, deploy, share and maintain data solutions throughout your organisation at scale.

With this, you can process, store, clean, share, analyse, model, and monetise your datasets using many different solutions, including machine learning and business intelligence (BI).

Azure Databricks provides a unified interface and tools for the following —

Data processing workflows scheduling and management
SQL
Generating dashboards
Generating Visualisations
Ingestion of data
Managing security, governance, and HA/DR
Data discovery
Data annotation and exploration
Compute management
Machine learning modelling and tracking
Machine learning model serving
Git source control

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics is a service that accelerates time to insight across whole data warehouses and large data systems. It unites the best of SQL, Apache Spark, and Azure Data Explorer to create the best solution for warehousing, analysing, and understanding data.

Synapse Analytics allows you to scale faster with limitless analytics, and optimise the performance of your data queries with intelligent workload management, workload isolation, and limitless concurrency.

Synapse Analytics also works with other 365 tools — Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 — seamlessly integrating intelligence into your most important data.

Data Lake Analytics

Azure Data Lake Analytics is an on-demand analytics service that simplifies big data with ease. Using Data Lake Analytics, you can undertake large data transformation processes and process programs in U-SQL, R, Python, and .NET with ease.

Instead of needing and managing your own infrastructure, Azure Data Lake lets you process data on demand, scale instantly, and only have to pay per job.

This whole process makes debugging and optimising your data far more efficient and simple, while also giving access to everything an enterprise-grade data project needs.

Azure Analysis Services

Azure Analysis Services is a managed platform as a service (PaaS) that gives you access to enterprise-grade data models in the cloud.

Analysis Services takes your data analysis and definition tools to the next level, with advanced mashup and modelling features that let you —

Combine data from multiple data sources
Define metrics with ease
Secure your data in a single data model
Utilise ad hoc data analysis much faster and more easily in Power BI and Excel

Power BI

Data is only as good as your understanding of it, and so data visualisation is vital to getting the most out of your data. Power BI is the best solution to turn your data into powerful visual intelligence.

Power BI is the strongest business intelligence tool available, giving any business easy access to the most powerful data tools in the world. Power BI allows you to easily connect your data sources — even worldwide — and create strong, unified, qualitative data.

Looking to Harness the Power of Data in Your Organisation?

Data is an important tool for any organisation looking to create well-informed choices on the future of their business. Without qualitative data tools to be able to fully harness the power of data in your institution, it can be hard to keep up in the modern business world.

If you’re looking to harness the power of data in your company, we’re here to help. Contact our team of experts to figure out how to best utilise Azure in your organisation to fully take advantage of the powerful data at your fingertips.