Azure Analytics – Timely insight for Data-driven decisions

Azure Analytics – Timely insight for Data-driven decisions

A data-driven culture is critical for businesses to thrive in today’s environment. In fact, a brand-new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey found that companies who embrace a data-driven culture experience a 4x improvement in revenue performance and better customer satisfaction.

Foundational to this culture is the ability to deliver timely insights to everyone in your organization across all your data. That is exactly what Microsoft aims to deliver with Azure Analytics and Power BI, and we should say that their cloud-first approach and efforts are paying off in value for customers. According to a recent commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study, Azure Analytics and Power BI deliver incredible value to customers with a 271 per cent ROI, while increasing satisfaction by 60 per cent.

Azure Analytics’ position in the leaders quadrant in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Analytics & BI, coupled with their performance in analytics could help businesses to have a strong foundation needed to implement a data-driven culture.

Basically, there are three key attributes needed to establish a data-driven culture

First, it is vital to get the best performance from your analytics solution across all your data, at the best possible price.

Second, it is critical that your data is accurate and trusted, with all the security and privacy rigour needed for today’s business environment.

Finally, a data-driven culture necessitates self-service tools that empower everyone in your organization to gain insights from your data.

Let’s take a deeper look into each one of these critical attributes.

Performance

When it comes to performance, Azure has it well covered. An independent study by GigaOm found that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is up to 14x faster and costs 94% less than other cloud providers. This unmatched performance is why leading companies like Anheuser-Busch Inbev adopt Azure.

Business can leverage the elasticity of SQL Data Warehouse to scale the instance up or down, so that customer only pays for the resources when they’re in use, significantly lowering our costs. This architecture performs significantly better than the legacy on-premises solutions and it also provides a single source of truth for all of the company’s data.

Security

Azure is the most secure cloud for analytics. This is according to Donald Farmer, a well-respected thought leader in the data industry, who recently stated, “Azure SQL Data Warehouse platform offers by far the most comprehensive set of compliance and security capabilities of any cloud data warehouse provider”. Since then, Microsoft announced Dynamic Data Masking and Data Discovery and Classification to automatically help protect and obfuscate sensitive data on-the-fly to further enhance data security and privacy.

Insights

Only when everyone in your organization has access to timely insights can you achieve a truly data-driven culture. Companies drive results when they break down data silos and establish a shared context of their business based on trusted data. Customers that use Azure Analytics and Power BI do exactly that. According to the same Forrester study, customers stated.

“Azure Analytics has helped with a culture change at our company. We are expanding into other areas so that everyone can make informed business decisions.” -Study interviewee
“Power BI was a huge success. We’ve added 25,000 users organically in three years.” – -Study interviewee

Azure Analytics and Power BI together can unlock the performance, security and insights for your entire organization. Its matured technology and tools propositions enable you to develop a data-driven culture needed to thrive. customers like Reckitt Benckiser, choose Azure for their analytics needs.

“Data is most powerful when it’s accessible and understandable. With this Azure solution, our employees can query the data however they want versus being confined to the few rigid queries our previous system required. It’s very easy for them to use Power BI Pro to integrate new data sets to deliver enormous value. When you put BI solutions in the hands of your boots on the ground—your sales force, marketing managers, product managers—it delivers a huge impact to the business.”

Wilmer Peres, Information Services Director, Reckitt Benckiser

When you add it all up, Azure Analytics and Power BI offer strong data analytics capabilities and scalability for growing needs. To learn more about Azure’s insights for all advantage, let’s connect!