Share your future with Azure Data and Analytics
TECH INTENSITY =(Tech adoption * Tech capability)^Trust
Analytical power and predictive power are the 2 important powers that every company thrives on getting. Both of these drives a company to become proactive from reactive in decision-making. This blog is about experts of talks from Microsoft’s event — https://msazuredataandanalytics2020.event.microsoft.com/
Why most of the data go unused?
Data is getting generated faster than we are able to understand it. This means, too much data isn’t understood. The main challenge relies on capturing data usefulness and providing it to the right individuals at the right moment. Companies are investing heavily in solving this problem. Let us see a few of their stories.
Microsoft’s own data to insights journey
Let us see quick excerpts of the discussion between Amy and Julia;
- How did you approach this data journey in Microsoft as a CFO?
- Grouped things to do as a set of activities to look backward, look forward(forecasting), determining the next best actions anyone in a company to do.
2. What are the challenges faced while moving forward?
- Data silos; Non-centralized and inconsistent.
- A lot of meetings to know where the data exist & who maintains it.
- Figuring out better ways to overcome 70% manual analytics.
3. What you have achieved?
- CFO’s dream — Not only do better but also do things less.
- Achieve insights in 30 minutes which took 3 weeks of time earlier.
4. Where are you headed next?
- It is not one single race you can achieve in a data journey. Once the data foundation is built, a lot of small races should have competed.
- To provide better results, we are re-imaging all the processes, data to insight pipelines repeatedly than automating them.
5. What would be your best advice to data leaders?
- There are no shortcuts in the data journey.
- Need patience as every goal may not get done as planned. But you will be able to get a lot of small-small wins along with small-small mistakes.
- Try, Fail, Learn, Prove at pace.
Customer’s data to insights journey
Each of the following was spoken by the people in the highest grade in that company how Microsoft was in their data journey.
Starbucks’ data journey with Microsoft
- Starbucks being the people business, priority is to better connect with customers. Starbucks use AI and “Deep brew” to help partners and store managers assist in serving best to the customers.
- With Microsoft, able to expand and set the data platform better. The innovation still going forward!
gsk’s data journey with Microsoft
- Data analytics is the key to life-saving vaccine discoveries in this COVID era. Speed on a larger scale especially.
- Data reliability has gotten increased over the science of genetics and the relationship between genes.
- The most important thing over-investing in data is “innovation”. Using data to process, develop medicines has drastically changed.
- Helps to be prepared for any future pandemics.
Grab’s data journey with Microsoft
- About 300+ analysts & scientists playing with 30,000 TBs of data each day. Using services like Azure Synapse and Sentinal helps to deliver better customer experiences. Data teams login in-parallel (any time) and deploy 100s of experiments about our customer 360 use cases.
- 2020 has been the year of adaptability and agility. The underlying pillar is having the data available and easily understandable helps to constantly test different hypotheses.
- Better data decisions were needed at this crucial year because there were a lot of changes in customer behavior as we all know.
- Tech for Good — Data literacy for the community around us in southeast Asia. We set up data available for even non-tech employees of Grab.
Core capabilities of Azure Data
- Analytics + AI →Synapse Analytics, Power BI, Dynamics 365, Azure Databricks, Azure AI combined together.
- Data Governance -> Azure Purview.
Analytics + AI
- At this event announced that the “Azure Synapse Analytics” service is generally available.
- “Azure Synapse Link” enables real-time analytics over operational data(SQL DB, Cosmos DB). Once the link enabled, ops data is made available for analytics optimized in a columnar structure like covering index.
The discussions continued with a detailed demo of Azure Synapse Studio over retail data combined with COVID public data to analyze the new sales pattern. From the data storage, querying, insights using machine learning, visualizing results in Power BI, share results in Teams channels, and maintaining the artifacts in DevOps fashion all was done in few mouse clicks!
Data Governance
“Azure Purview” enables you to build a holistic map of data assets including data relationships and lineage across your entire data estate. Provides data source scanning across multi-clouds and hybrid data sources making data maps automatically populated and cover the entire data estate comprehensively.
That paves the way for better governing the data by tracking Where and What your data is by mapping all your data in one dictionary, no matter where it resides (on-premise, any cloud provider).
In summary, customer’s strategic data sets can be well used/governed with Azure Synapse and Purview ever before!!
