In today's fast-paced business landscape, staying ahead of the competition requires efficient and effective solutions. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, nearly 70% of employee report that they don’t have sufficient time in the day to focus on “work”, with more time being spent Communicating than Creating.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed, with Microsoft’s cloud trust platform at its core, to allow for employees to both be more productive, reduce the time spent searching for information, performing mundane tasks, and other low-value activities.
Benefits of combining and integrating data from multiple business areas in an Enterprise Data Warehouse using Azure SQL Database
Business leaders today understand the value of performance insights gained from combining the data of multiple organizational units. Usually, an organization already has performance data housed in a system tailored to the needs of a given functional area. HR teams may use a system such as Workday, whereas commercial teams will use a system like Salesforce to manage their data. One of the challenges faced by business leaders is to present data-driven insights that also account for the performance of different business areas, each of which may use systems tailored to their end.
Building an enterprise data warehouse is a common solution for integrating data from multiple areas into a single system, which can then be used as a primary source for reporting and insights. Building an enterprise data warehouse means that you will be building a new system from the ground up, a complex process with many challenges. For business leaders, one of those challenges is ensuring that the new system works properly and does not frequently go down, especially when the decisions to be made are critical.
If an organization decides to build its own enterprise data warehouse, and the infrastructure upon which it sits, the organization needs to ensure that its reporting and analytics specialists are supported by a team of IT systems specialists.
A team of IT systems specialists would be necessary to ensure the functionality, maintenance, and modernization of the data warehouse and its infrastructure; reporting and analytics teams typically do not possess the time or resources needed to troubleshoot problems related to IT systems.
Moreover, reporting analysts are usually specialists in their areas, such as sales or finance, and do not typically possess the years of experience and training required to be database administrators. In most cases, an organization would need to reassign existing IT specialists or hire new ones to ensure the success of the initial build, and the ongoing maintenance of the enterprise data warehouse and its infrastructure.
Organizations can overcome many of the challenges associated with the ownership of physical infrastructure, and the onboarding of specialized IT teams by building an enterprise data warehouse in Microsoft Azure, using Azure SQL Database.
Azure SQL Database enables an organization to build a fully-managed relational database within minutes in the Azure portal. An Azure SQL Database can be deployed in the Azure portal by specifying the properties and attributes of the database, including the compute and storage capability of its physical infrastructure.
Data from the systems used by multiple business areas, such as HR or sales, can be combined and integrated in Azure SQL Database with Azure Data Factory. Azure Data Factory is a service available in Azure that simplifies the process of Extract, Transfer, and Load (ETL) development by greatly minimizing the need for code and other tasks associated with traditional application development.
Insight into the performance of multiple business areas of an organization enables leaders to make better decisions without limiting their decision-making to a single business unit.
Understanding business impact on a broader scale undoubtedly provides leaders with the perspective needed to effectively manage an organization, and ensure its success throughout all of its efforts. Data warehouses have been used by organizations to achieve broader insights into the performance of multiple business units. Compared to traditional IT solutions, Azure SQL Database has been shown to have numerous benefits, including the reduction of internal IT resources needed to ensure proper functionality.
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