It’s the 1980’s and new technology is rife. People are rocking Sony Walkman’s and Danny Glover’s character in the hit movie Lethal Weapon uses a Nokia to phone his psychologist.
Outside of the view of the public eye, a revolutionary concept was also born within the data centers of large enterprises in the form of a Data Warehouse. What was seen as a revolutionary concept at the time has since become less popular due to modern data and analytics demands on businesses.
The concept of the Walkman and the original Nokia Mobira Talkman has evolved drastically since the 1980’s as technology and the world has changed, but the core principles are still in use today. In contrast to the evolution of the mobile music player and phone, we have the data warehouse that was born in the same era yet most businesses’ have not evolved their data warehouse to support modern business requirements.
The Ongoing Drum of Technology
The requirements from a modern business have made the limitations of a classic data warehouse glaringly obvious. These requirements include things like self-service dashboards, easy setup, and management of complex ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) processes, fast load times for data take-on, granular data security that doesn’t hamper business users but allows them to access only the data sets that have been assigned to them, seamless integration of data science solutions with real-time analytics and all of this should be managed by a small team of engineers and should be automatically scaled with a 99.9% up-time and regional or global replication.
Due to these limitations, the company’s data landscapes have regressed back into a fractured and disparate landscape with different business divisions running their own subsets of data in their own data store for their own analytical and reporting needs. As you can imagine, this opens companies up to a whole host of data security/compliance vulnerabilities and in addition, limits the speed that critical business decisions can be made as predictive and prescriptive analytics cannot be implemented on a disparate data landscape.
So, is a concept that started back in the 80’s still relevant today? Like the original Walkman and mobile phone, this concept is more relevant today and has evolved into a new solution that still relates to the original concept.
Cloud computing has allowed the original idea of a data warehouse to evolve into a modern data platform that answers the needs of modern business requirements. Today the modern cloud data platform is a strategic tool that companies use to ensure they are ahead of competitors by enabling data-driven decisions to be made based on all data in the company whether it is on-premise, cloud-based or part of an external third party.
Modern Data Warehouse with Azure
A modern data warehouse (MDW) lets you easily bring all of your data together at any scale. It doesn’t matter if it’s structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data. You can gain insights from a MDW through company-wide analytical dashboards, operational reports, or advanced analytics. A MDW allows your data engineers and scientists to work closely together in the same workspace to ensure ease of data access and a uniform data policy is applied.
With Azure Synapse Analytics you get scalable, cloud-based integrated analytics.The four main components that Azure Synapse brings together are – SQL pool and SQL on-demand (used in enterprise data warehousing), Apache Spark (used in Big Data), Synapse Pipelines (used for data integration, ETL and ELT) and Synapse Studio. The Azure Synapse Workspace unifies different components into a single common user-friendly interface and provides a unique experience. Azure Synapse also integrates seamlessly with other Azure services such as Power BI, CosmosDB, and AzureML.
With the help of Synapse Studio, Synapse offers a perfect workspace for data engineers and data scientists to work closely together and for people to easily collaborate while still ensuring your data is secure.
The Real Benefits of Synapse Reporting to Your Business
Azure Synapse helps you transform your business with the help of rich features like data lake integration, centralized repository for different data sources, ability to create powerful and rich dashboards – altogether within a single platform. It is a limitless analytics service that connects data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics under the hood. This gives users the capability to ingest data, manage and serve it back for AI/ML and Business Intelligence purposes.
Synapse also offers rich analytical and reporting capabilities through the integration of Microsoft’s dashboarding tool, Power BI. By integrating into Power BI to deliver real-time, valuable reports, businesses can generate end-to-end visual representations of their data directly from the data warehouse. The seamless integration between Synapse and PowerBi ensures that business units can easily access their data, and with Azure’s security features you can ensure that only the relevant people gets access to subsets of data.
Synapse offers a perfect workspace for users to manage their data.
These are some of the benefits you can realize when using Synapse Studio as part of your Modern Cloud Operations:
1 – User Friendliness
One of the common benefits of Synapse Analytics is that it allows database administrators to manage the data from a single place. This reduces the complexity involved to manage and maintain multiple, disparate systems and leads to the reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). Synapse helps businesses build advanced analytics solutions faster, in a simplified way. There is no need to write any code to bring different services together. Everything can be done from the comfort of a web browser on the Microsoft Azure portal. The data pipelines feature allows to easily set up ETL/ELT pipelines in a visual manner without writing one line of code. In addition, the connectors built into Synapse allows you to connect to different data sources whether they are on-premises or in the cloud.
2 – Cost and Resource Savings
Performing data analytics and gathering insights takes up significant cost and resource utilization in the organization. This is where Microsoft Azure scores high on the charts compared to other cloud service vendors. Azure Synapse Analytics is 14x faster and costs 94% less than other cloud providers.
3 – Security
When it comes to security, Azure is known to be one of the safest cloud service providers and the most trusted cloud service offering in the market. With multi-layered security and encryption, you can be sure that your data and environment are secure.
Conclusion
Change is constant and the evolution of technology is always going to be a factor in our lives. Progressive technology can help your business evolve into a modern workspace that empowers your employees to do more, gives customers peace of mind with their data security, and drives your business into the future.
