Diffusing BI Time Bombs with Azure

In this Azure Every Day installment, I’d like to tell you how you can diffuse some time bombs that exist in your BI and Data Warehouse systems by migrating those platforms up to Azure. Here are 3 main areas where BI systems can have challenges and how Azure can help alleviate them:

1.  Complicated ETL- Do you have a convoluted ETL that is hard to change or it has complicated business rules or no one really understands it? With Azure, there are lots of options we can use to make your ETL easier to manage and gain higher performance. By moving to the cloud, we can often take that ETL apart and move some of that processing and transformation closer to the data, by using HD Insight for Spark, for example. We can do it in a language like R or Python that can be better used by the business, as well as orchestrate that ETL better with Azure Data Factory.

2.  Speed – Does it take a lot of time to make a change to your Data Warehouse environment? Let’s say a request comes in to add a column to the data warehouse and that takes 4 weeks. This time consumption leads to frustration for the business. By moving that environment into Azure, you get much more flexibility, which allows you to take advantage of speed. Not only can you make changes more quickly, but you can also make changes in other areas. For instance, maybe you only have to make a change to a model in Power BI or bring that data into Azure storage, instead of having to model it all the way through to the data warehouse.

3.  Marginal Performance – Do you feel great about the performance of your data warehouse? If you’re answer is just “I feel OK," or the performance has never gotten better or it seems to gets worse, then move those workloads to the cloud. Migrate to the cloud and you’ll gain the flexibility which will give you more performance and control over where you’re investing your dollar. Whether you keep your workloads in a data warehouse or split them up there, you’ll now have the ability to scale them on demand, to predict when you need more or less performance, as well as to manage costs by not running them overnight or scaling out batch processing.

We’ve helped thousands of customers to think about their data strategy and migrate to Azure over the past few years. And we’re here to help you. We’d love to get your data strategy on the right track and help you move your BI environment into the cloud. Contact us or click the link below to get started today.