Azure Synapse Analytics is not a mere data warehouse anymore. The limitless analytics with Azure Synapse Analytics facilitate organizations to be data-driven and extract insights from large data volumes.
The digital business ecosystem is rapidly changing. The emergence of new tools and technologies and the changing customer preferences and behavior requires every business to be hyper-aware of the dynamic market changes and react accordingly. Organizations need real-time analytics, streaming data insights, advanced analytics, AI, and reporting to stay ahead and create a competitive advantage. Analytics and AI seem to be the top investment for most businesses, though they still face challenges in maximizing the RoI.
Azure Synapse Analytics – Unified cloud-based Intelligence
Many businesses face challenges pulling out siloed data to create a unified and democratized view for generating valuable business intelligence. Though you have volumes of data within your business, it creates value only when you leverage advanced analytics and AI to generate insights for business decisions.
With the shift towards the cloud, a modern cloud analytics platform offers a centralized location for all your data, structured and unstructured, for further insights. It seems the most cost-effective way to generate insights while providing robust security and data governance controls.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics leverages both big data and data warehousing abilities to provide an unparalleled experience for limitless analytics. Though it looks simple, it uses SQL data warehousing abilities, big data capabilities from Spark, and a no-code environment powered by Azure pipelines to offer a holistic performance for multiple organizational needs.
As per the Forrester Economic Impact assessment, Azure Synapse Analytics with Power BI can provide a 271% RoI and reduce the total ownership cost by 26%. Additionally, it improves the time to insights by 27% and customer satisfaction by 60%.
Limitless Analytics with Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics offers comprehensive capabilities to build pipelines for data ingestion, transformation, ELT, and machine learning needs. The unique Azure Synapse Analytics Integrations with Cosmos DB, Azure ML, Power BI, and Azure Data Lake offers unified data management, query performance, and security compared to other enterprise data lakes. Moreover, Azure Synapse Studio provides the needed GUI for your data team to build limitless analytics solutions. Let us know more details about the endless analytics capabilities with Azure Synapse Analytics.
1. Seamless Streaming Analytics
The streaming data analysis options – As we know, the Spark capabilities in Azure Synapse Analytics offer users the ability to process streaming data in multiple ways. Using the Spark Structured Streaming feature, the Synapse pipeline can leverage streaming data from the input platforms like Azure IoT Hub or Events Hub.
It also supports offline stream processing through support from external services like Azure Cosmos DB. Moreover, users can create the Azure Cosmos DB link and leverage the Spark engine capabilities to create pipelines in either continuous or batch processing modes.
Potential use cases – Users can leverage various components in the Azure ecosystem and solutions applicable to the construction, mining, oil and gas, media and telecom and manufacturing industries where you need to analyze large data volumes from many IoT devices and sensors. The potential scenarios:
- Analyzing the equipment operating conditions and performance to reduce downtime
- Remote management of the equipment conditions and centralized control of equipment data
- Personalized experiences for telecom, media, and OTT consumers
- Large data sets ingestion and analysis
- Analyzing sensor data and imagery to improve operating conditions and predictive capabilities
Azure Stream Analytics, the event processing engine, analyzes large volumes of data from IoT devices and sensors. Also, it helps in extracting information from various data streams to detect patterns and establish relationships.
2. Real-time Analytics
Azure Synapse Link – Performing traditional workloads with Azure Cosmos DB was challenging as they are difficult to develop and maintain. The Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB does not impact the transactional workloads while performing analytics over this data. How is this possible? The Cosmos BD Analytical store syncs the transactional data to a columnar store without needing ETL and provides users with near real-time analytics capabilities.
Cosmos DB is schema-agnostic and great for performing super-fast transactional reads and writes. But this is a row store, wherein the users had to engineer ETL pipelines to extract the data into a separate data layer to perform analytics workloads. The entire process added additional overheads and latency to development efforts.
The Azure Cosmos DB Analytics store addresses this challenge. It is a columnar store that automatically synchronizes data from our row store to perform analytical queries without additional ETL pipelines. This sync has a 2-minute latency and will occur regardless of the intensity of transactional traffic.
Potential use cases – Azure Synapse Link offers cloud-native transactional and analytical processing with Azure Cosmos DB, enabling businesses to run near real-time analytics over the operational data.
The potential use cases are:
- Supply chain forecasting and analytics
The Azure capabilities need to sync up the streaming, transactional, and traditional data collectively for generating holistic supply chain insights—Azure Data Factory to connect the data from multiple sources to Cosmos DB. Azure Synapse Link and Azure Cosmos DB Analytics Store leveraged to query operational data with Apache Spark Pools or Serverless SQL Pool. The solution needs customization according to your business needs, data architecture, and supply chain complexity.
- Personalization
Using Synapse Spark and ML models, you can generate insights that can help in targeted marketing efforts and personalization for your business. What else? Synapse Link for Cosmos DB allows for super-fast processing of transactions and customer service data to enable customers’ personalized product/service recommendations. Most importantly, OTT providers can leverage these capabilities to provide personalized content recommendations for their tech-savvy consumers.
- Predictive maintenance
The Industry 4.0 and IoT innovations have increased the efficiency of the equipment while reducing downtime and improving availability. As the growth of digital twin initiatives increases, organizations are collecting volumes of data from IoT devices and sensors to create a digital copy of each piece of equipment. Hence Azure Synapse Link, Cosmos DB, and Azure Streaming Analytics offer real-time monitoring by analyzing the operational data and detecting patterns.
- Network optimization
With the growth in 5G and edge computing, telcos need to constantly improve their network resilience. This can be done by visualizing all the network assets in real-time and predicting the future needs.
3. Advanced Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces provide holistic advanced analytics solutions leveraging Machine Learning and Cognitive Services. Synapse ML, through its open-source library, simplifies ML development and deployment. With the Cognitive Services pre-built APIs, Synapse ML leverages libraries like Form Recognizer, Anomaly Detection, Text Analytics, etc., to support different use cases.
With the Cognitive Services wizard, you can also select from pre-trained ML models for Sentiment analysis, customer segmentation, and many more. Moreover, you can integrate Azure ML pipelines within Synapse pipelines easily.
4. Reporting
With the out-of-the-box connectors, you can easily connect Azure Synapse workspaces to Power BI. Using Power Query and other functions, users can preview data before importing and identifying relationships and related tables. Additionally, Azure Analysis Services acts as an intermediary between data and Power BI reporting layers in case your organization needs one. Security and identity management are seamless with Azure Active Directory Single Sign-on integration. Though we tried to present the limitless analytics capabilities of Azure Synapse Analytics, it offers you comprehensive solutions customizable for your business needs. You need to leverage the right components in the Microsoft ecosystem for your holistic needs. Our experts are a click away from addressing your queries. Contact us for more information.