A Real-World Story About Business Transformation with Azure

At Pragmatic Works, we’re all about helping you transform your business and your data. I’m excited to share a real-world story about a company that, with our help, is transforming the way that they do reporting and analysis using all the data tool and platforms offered in the Azure cloud.

This insurance brokerage firm has agencies all over the world and they had enormous growth goals. The problem was they had a small team of people still manually processing all their data in Excel and it would take months to figure out if they were compliant or if they were truly profitable; plus, were they serving the needs of all the agencies that were part of their organization?

Pragmatic Works came in and looked at the data they had coming in over time, all in different formats and structures, and devised a plan. We asked things like:

• How can we take advantage of things like Azure Data Lake and Azure analytics?
• How can we utilize the scale of Azure Data Warehouse?
• How can we get their users more access to the data with Power BI and teach them to self-serve, so this doesn’t all fall on the same small group of people?

Not only was this customer at risk for GDPR non-compliance, they also could not even get close to their growth targets.

Since we’ve done the work of moving them into the Azure cloud, they are embracing their cloud transformation journey. They’re doing so much more in the cloud, such as adding Databricks solutions for scale out and additional processing capacity.

Most companies are afraid to get out of their comfort zone. They resist making this transformation because ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’. But there’s this nagging feeling that they can’t continue to grow without changing.

We teamed up with this organization to figure out what data they had, what data they needed to have access to and analyze, and who should be working on it. Once we got through this business analysis with them, we turned that into a technology platform, in a very straightforward way, using the Azure cloud. Unlike AWS or other competitors, Azure is built to bring all these services together.

One of the main things that accelerated this solution was being able to take Azure Data Warehouse, Data Lake Analytics, Databricks, Power BI, all the storage platforms, as well as SQL Database and bring them together into one architecture. Everyone now gets the data they need, things are running at the right service and scale, plus they’re getting the performance that will keep them running for years to come.

I was super excited to share this example with you, as we get a lot of questions from customers and our YouTube viewers asking: What are real customers doing? How are they leveraging these different solutions?

You too can achieve this transformation. You can start small with a data mart, data warehouse or doing your reporting with Power BI. There’s so much opportunity when you look at using a modern cloud that is designed to work together and work for how you want to work.

We’re a preferred cloud partner with Microsoft and we can help your transformation to the cloud work too. If you’d like to speak with us about your challenges and how we can help you begin your journey, please contact us—we’d love to help.