Many companies today have long had analytical data warehouses in place in their data centres to support decision making in different parts of their business. Sales, marketing and finance departments in particular are heavy users of such systems producing standard reports and dashboards. They also employ business analysts to perform ad hoc query and analysis on data in data marts designed for multi-dimensional analysis using self-service business intelligence (BI) tools.
However, while data warehouses support some key aspects of decision making, the shift to digital technologies over the last several years has seen changes happening around the data warehouse that are having a major impact on traditional analytical systems. This includes source transaction processing systems – such as CRM and HR systems – moving to the cloud. Often this is done to consolidate similar systems, to scale and to enable mobile self-service access to transaction processing systems by customers, partners, suppliers and employees. This has resulted in data warehouses now needing to capture data from cloud SaaS applications. In addition, new data has emerged that businesses are now capturing such as online clickstream, social network data, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data, open government data, weather data, image, audio and video data. However, very little of this type of data has made it into data warehouses. In fact, it is often processed and analysed separately at scale in the cloud while data scientists use it to build machine learning predictive and prescriptive analytics.
In addition, with so many new data and analytics technologies now appearing on the cloud first, the attraction of moving analytical workloads to the cloud to quickly take advantage of these technologies is becoming more and more compelling. Given this backdrop, it is not surprising that many companies are now considering moving their data warehouses to the cloud as part of a data warehouse modernisation exercise.
Today, many organisations are migrating their legacy data warehouse solutions to Azure Synapse Analytics to gain the benefits of and end-to-end analytics platform that provides high availability, security, speed, scalability, cost savings and industry-leading performance for enterprise data warehousing workloads.
As technologies evolve, the benefits of having a cloud-based data warehouse solution far outweigh its on-premises counterparts. Azure Synapse not only provides industry-leading performance for running enterprise data warehousing workloads in the cloud, but it is also an end-to-end analytics platform that brings data ingestion, data warehousing and big data analytics into a single service. With its scalability and separate compute and storage architecture, Azure Synapse can be scaled instantly in ways not possible with legacy systems such as Teradata, Netezza or Exadata.
There are several business benefits as to why you should consider migrating to Azure Synapse to help you lower total cost of ownership, improve price/performance and leverage a rich ecosystem of additional data and analytical technologies that can help you modernise your data warehouse and also shorten time to value.
Beyond the business benefits of running your enterprise data warehouse in the cloud with Azure Synapse, all data professionals can now use a unified experience for data prep, data management, data warehousing, big data and AI tasks. With two ways to analyse data through provisioned workloads or through the serverless consumption model that offers pay-per-query functionality, customers can choose the most cost-effective option for each use case. Additionally, when it comes to data, security and privacy are of utmost importance and underpin the insights discovered using analytics. Advanced security and privacy are built into the fabric of Azure Synapse, such as always-on data encryption. For fine-grained access control, businesses can help ensure data stays safe and private using column-level security and native row-level security, as well as dynamic data masking to automatically protect sensitive data in real time.
With the leading team of Microsoft Azure engineers in Ireland, Spanish Point is ready to work with you to develop an Azure and Power BI solution that suits your business needs. Contact sales@spanishpoint.ie to organise a SMART Analytics Assessment for your organisation.
