Azure Synapse Analytics Use Cases and Benefits

Operational disruptions, strategic pivots & remote working – all have highlighted that analytics plays a pivotal role in optimizing business processes & products. But unexplored situations demand reliable insights in real-time so businesses can immediately identify what’s working & what’s not.

Following the global pandemic, the urgency for business-leading insights has only been intensified, aggravating the need for up-to-the-minute analytics. Equally imperative is the need to extract and share these insights in the most cost-efficient way. This is where Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics comes into play! It allows organizations working in siloed infrastructure to manage and analyze their data from a single place, thereby breaking down all possible silos – team, data and skills.

If you’re also someone looking to expedite time-to-insight with a unified experience while saving big on costs, then dig in to know why it is the need of the hour, how it works, where it fits best & why you should give it a go!

This post will cover:

• What Is Azure Synapse Analytics?
• Why Use Azure Synapse Analytics?
• Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits
• Azure Synapse Analytics Use Cases
• Rishabh’s Azure Synapse Analytics Footprint

Formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, it is an analytics service from Microsoft that offers a unified workspace for both enterprise data warehouse and big data analytics.

Let’s assume that a C-level executive needs a detailed report on sales performance in the northern U.S. over the last quarter. Typically this would require the data engineer to invest considerable time and effort to locate this piece of information and with some extensive yet precise coding to tie diverse services together. They might also need the assistance of a systems integration partner to extract it. Sounds like a time-consuming, expensive & exhaustive proposition! Isn’t it?

But Azure Synapse Analytics can make this easy! The platform offers the flexibility to query data on-demand, using dedicated options and serverless – at scale. It is therefore, you can quickly ingest the data, transform and query it using SQL.

Listed below are Key Azure Synapse Analytics Features

• Centralized Data Management: Azure Synapse utilizes Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) technology. It allows processing and management of large workloads and efficiently handling large data volumes. Deliver unified experience by managing both data lakes as well as data warehouses.
• Workload Isolation: This capability allows users to manage the execution of heterogeneous workloads. It offers increased flexibility by exclusively reserving resources for a specific workload group. This is while having complete control over warehouse resources to satisfy business SLAs.
• Machine Learning Integration: By integrating Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics enables leveraging ML capabilities. This can help predict and score the ML models to generate predictions within the data warehouse itself. Further, it allows converting the existing & trained ML models into Synapse Analytics itself as opposed to recreating the entire model again. This helps businesses to save time, money and effort.

Further, businesses can also analyze the data using machine learning algorithms and visualize the result over a rich PowerBI Dashboard, how about that? Hence it is a great tool for companies to manage real-time analytics for:

• Supply chain forecasting
• Inventory reporting
• Predictive maintenance
• Anomaly detection

Businesses of today use a variety of tools to manage, store and analyze workloads. And, you will agree, things can go wrong when one of the interconnected systems faces a downtime or any other technical challenge. Azure Synapse Analytics offers businesses centralized management of the data lakes and data warehouses. Interestingly, Azure Synapse Studio offers a unified workspace for data preparation, data management, data warehousing, Big Data & Artificial Intelligence tasks.

Here are some of the salient benefits;

Accelerate Analytics & Reporting

• Reduced manual efforts for collecting, collating and building reports
• Instant scalability & flexibility leads to no downtimes with workload variations
• Faster DWH deployment

Better BI & Data Visualization

• The seamless and native integration with Power BI makes the reporting & analysis of key metrics that are engaging, easy-to-use. This makes it even easier to share with relevant stakeholders across business streams – a word of advice: fewer data silos leads to more visibility.

Increased IT productivity

• Enables staff to automate infrastructure provisioning and administrative tasks (includes DWH setup, patch management & maintenance)

Limitless Scaling

• Being a cloud-based service, Azure Synapse Analytics can view, organize and queries (relational & non-relational data) faster than traditional on-premises tools. In other words, you can efficiently manage thousands of concurrent users and systems. And, when compared with Google’s BigQuery, Synapse could run the same query in roughly 75% less time over a petabyte of data.

Synapse Analytics enables businesses across industries to use their data much more securely, accurately, productively & efficiently by collating insights from diverse data sources, warehouses & analytics solutions. Let’s see how with some practical real-world applications.

Manufacturing

Optimize operations with real-time insights at scale

Industry 4.0 combines operations with analytics and enables instant access to accurate data which in turn enables manufacturers to:

• Avert Unplanned Downtime: Accurate prediction of potential equipment failure to reduce maintenance costs, avoid costly downtime and boost operational efficiency.
• Magnify Supply Chain Visibility: Integrate diverse data sources across the supply chain to gain 360-degree visibility of business operations.

Retail

Unify siloed data & satisfy more customers

Centralize information from connected sales channels & generate insights in real-time to serve customers better & create a robust supply chain.

• Use Omnichannel Optimization: Create a seamless customer journey that enables shoppers to switch between different sales outlets, platforms & devices while ensuring a cohesive purchase experience.
• Personalize Recommendations: Ingest, clean, process and explore data about the customer to extract actionable insights to offer relevant & personalized offerings. Craft customer journeys and experiences by consolidating varied customer data sources & refine them in real-time
• Build a Future-Ready Supply Chain: Identify key trends from your shoppers’ purchase history, browsing patterns & buying preferences to drive marketing campaigns and merchandising decisions. Use end-to-end analytics to eliminate silos and enhance vendor collaboration with easy sharing of inventory data.

Healthcare

Empower care teams, stay compliant, secure data & personalize care

Ease the pressure exerted by a shortage of care workers, constantly changing regulatory requirements and rising patient expectations.

• Automate Care Operations: Provide patients with easy access to the healthcare data they need to receive the right care on time. Accelerate routine operations by consolidating data across health IT systems and free up your care providers to focus on improving patient care quality.
• Apply Clinical Analytics: Analyze patient health data to link symptoms with diseases and recommend the right treatment plans. Use clinical variables to uncover trends and detect predictors for accurately forecasting readmissions and therapies.
• Implement Clinical Analytics: Detect workflow inefficiencies and impending regulatory risks across data sources. Reinforce transparency, accountability and quality checks across healthcare operations.

Financial Services

Employ a modern approach to big data management

Stay competitive, curate personalized customer journeys, ensure compliance and implement effective governance practices.

• Customize Products & Services: Connect distinct data sources for an all-encompassing view of client profiles and demographics to curate relevant offerings and deliver exceptional experiences.
• Detect Potential Frauds: Enhance customer trust by tracking transactional activity across accounts & devices 24×7 to alert instantly in case of a potential threat and detect frauds at the very first instance.
• Manage & Mitigate Risk: Consolidated and agile approach to compile and analyze enterprise data. Implement cost-effective solutions that enable a swift and sensible response to risks.

Rishabh is a Microsoft Gold partner for data analytics. We can help you get started quickly and harness the full potential of Azure Synapse across:

• Data Warehouse: Seamless integration with varied data services and platforms
• Descriptive Analytics: Data exploration and discovery using T-SQL queries against a synapse database
• Reporting & Data Visualization: Integration with Power BI for faster and informed decision making
• Realtime Analytics: Data unification of disparate operational sources to deploy real-time analytics solutions
• Advanced Analytics: Leveraging Azure Databricks to extract optimum value from your data to drive better business outcomes

You can learn more about our full-spectrum data analytics service offerings and how we can add value.