No matter what type of business you run, chances are you’re drowning in a massive amount of data. Be it data about your customers, sales, web traffic, social media engagement, employees or general operations, making sense of it all can be overwhelming to say the least.
In addition, the siloed nature of this data has traditionally made it impossible to see the full picture or gain a comprehensive understanding of your business’s operations and performance.
For example:
- financial data resides in your cloud accounting software
- customer data resides in your cloud-based CRM
- website data resides in your web analytics tool
- employee data resides in your on-premise HR software
Without a solution to unify all this data, your business cannot achieve the coveted “single source of truth” – a point from which to make clear, informed and data-driven decisions. Reporting is slow, errors are common, and data-reliant processes are always time consuming.
In the past, consolidating on-premise and cloud-based data was costly and difficult. Technology lacked the necessary tools and capabilities to seamlessly integrate and harmonise data from diverse sources, and businesses were left with a fragmented data landscape resembling a scattered puzzle with missing pieces.
These days however, advanced data integration platforms and algorithms are bridging this gap and addressing these challenges – effortlessly connecting, combining, and synchronising data from any number of on-premise or cloud-based sources.
Azure Synapse Analytics: breaking down data silos and driving data-driven decisions
Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft’s latest and most comprehensive analytics and data integration platform. It’s an exciting evolution from Azure’s early days over a decade ago, where the focus was equipping businesses with everything they needed to build, deploy, and manage applications and services in the cloud.
With the rise in big data, Azure Synapse now brings together the power of big data and data warehousing into a single unified service so businesses can efficiently manage, analyse, and gain valuable insights from their vast data sets.
So how does it work?
Think of Azure Synapse like a supercharged analytics assistant that takes your chaotic data and transforms it into business intelligence. It seamlessly collates data from all your various sources and organises it in a way that makes sense.
Infinitely scalable, the platform is capable of ingesting data from both on-premise and cloud-based sources – with tools such as Apache Spark and Serverless SQL which allow you to slice and dice data, run complex analytics, and uncover patterns and trends that were hidden before.
For everyday business users, Azure Synapse’s seamless integration with Power BI enables powerful data visualisation and reporting capabilities so your people can easily understand and communicate insights. They can explore and analyse data from multiple sources in real time – applying filters, drilling down, and sharing information with peers. Far from age-old reporting, Power BI reporting helps them unlock real business intelligence and tell compelling stories to drive action and fuel growth.
If your business employs data scientists and analysts, Azure Synapse empowers them to build machine learning models and predict customer behaviour to assist with strategic planning and risk management.
You don’t have to be a large enterprise to benefit from Azure Synapse Analytics
The unification of data is the pinnacle of achieving a holistic and comprehensive understanding of your business operations, customers, and market dynamics.
Fortunately, Azure Synapse isn’t reserved for multinational enterprises – the same capability that’s available to a 40,000 seat business is available to a 40-seat business or less. This includes the platform’s comprehensive security and governance features such as role-based access controls, data encryption, threat detection, auditing, and more.
Wherever you are in your data journey, Azure Synapse can help you take it to the next level so you can:
- gain a 360-degree view of operations
- connect the dots between different divisions
- identify correlations and trends
- uncover risks, opportunities and insights that would otherwise go unnoticed
Instead of a scattered puzzle with missing pieces, Azure Synapse Analytics brings all the puzzle pieces together so you can see the complete picture.
While smaller organisations may be concerned about the cost and effort to deploy this type of technology, it’s actually a lot more cost effective than you may think. Microsoft has invested heavily in democratising technology to make it accessible to businesses of all sizes, and we have assisted many smaller organisations to harness the power of the platform within a budget they can afford.
Whether you’re a growing retail store or a national manufacturing company with a heavy dependence on data, we can work with you to understand exactly what challenges you’re facing and then provide our best recommendations to overcome them.
In addition, we can assist with end-to-end Power BI integration, including user friendly dashboard and reporting design, so you can begin putting your analytics to work sooner – accelerating your time to value with a new single source of truth that empowers teams to make data-driven decisions with confidence and agility.
To find out how Azure Synapse Analytics can transform your business, please get in touch.