How to use Microsoft Azure to unlock business insights

Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse technologies are the perfect tools to develop business insights from big data. Data lakes simplify data analysis by wrapping all your data in a single storage environment, no complex building of import pipelines for data needed. With that simplified storage pool comes a new generation of query tools to explore and analyse the data. Using such tools makes it much easier to work with rapidly changing data, enabling you to get insights quickly and build reporting environments that can flag any issues as they arise.

Key benefits of using Azure Data Lake Storage include: You can significantly reduce the risk of a security breach thanks to Microsoft Security Graph; you can take advantage of large-scale Azure VM instances and scalable storage; the hierarchical namespace makes it easier to work with data; and there’s no need for expensive and slow ETL-based transformations.

Once your data is in a Data Lake store, you can run your choice of analytics tooling over it, including Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure’s hybrid analytical environment combines big data tooling and relational queries in a single environment by mixing SQL with Apache Spark, removing the usual barriers which stand between standard SQL queries and big data platforms. Azure Synapse also provided direct connections to Azure data services and to the Power Platform.

To find out more about Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse Analytics, read the full article from TechRepublic here.