A guide to migrating existing processes to Azure Synapse Analytics
Many companies today have long had analytical data warehouses in place in their data centers to support decision making in different parts of their business. Sales, marketing, and finance departments in particular are heavy users of such systems producing standard reports and dashboards. They also employ business analysts to perform ad hoc query and analysis on data in data marts designed for multi-dimensional analysis using self- service business intelligence (BI) tools.
However, while data warehouses support some key aspects of decision making, the shift to digital technologies over the last several years has seen changes happening around the data warehouse that are having a major impact on traditional analytical systems. This includes source transaction processing systems– such as CRM, HR, and ERP systems–moving to the cloud. Often this is done to consolidate similar systems, to scale and to enable mobile self-service access to transaction processing systems by customers (e.g. mobile banking), partners, suppliers, and employees. This has resulted in data warehouses now needing to capture data from cloud SaaS applications. In addition, new data has emerged that businesses are now capturing such as on-line clickstream, social network data, internet of things (IoT) sensor data, open government data, weather data, image, audio and video data. However, very little of this type of data has made it into data warehouses. In fact, it is often processed and analyzed separately at scale in the cloud while data scientists use it to build machine learning predictive and prescriptive analytics.
In addition, with so many new data and analytics technologies now appearing on the cloud first, the attraction of moving analytical workloads to the cloud to quickly take advantage of these technologies is becoming more and more compelling. Given this backdrop, it is not surprising that many companies are now considering moving their data warehouses to the cloud as part of a data warehouse modernization exercise.
Today, many organizations are migrating their legacy data warehouse solutions to Azure Synapse Analytics to gain the benefits of and end-to-end analytics platform that provides high availability, security, speed, scalability, cost savings, and industry-leading performance for enterprise data warehousing workloads.
As technologies evolve, the benefits of having a cloud-based data warehouse solution far outweigh its on- premises counterparts. Azure Synapse not only provides industry-leading performance for running enterprise data warehousing workloads in the cloud, it is an end-to-end analytics platform that brings data ingestion, data warehousing, and big data analytics into a single service. With its scalability and separate compute and storage architecture, Azure Synapse can be scaled instantly in ways not possible with legacy systems such as Teradata, Netezza, or Exadata.
There are several business benefits as to why you should consider migrating to Azure Synapse to help you lower total cost of ownership, improve price/performance, and leverage a rich ecosystem of additional data and analytical technologies that can help you modernize your data warehouse and also shorten time to value.
Business benefits include:
- Lower implementation and maintenance costs – pay only for what you use
- No infrastructure to manage so you can focus on competitive insights
- Pay for data and analytics tools only when needed, pausing consumption when not in use
Migrating Your Legacy Appliance to Azure Synapse Analytics
- Reduction in analytics project development time and increased innovation
- Ability to independently scale storage from compute
- Low cost storage for staging and production data
- Avoid expensive upgrades as data volumes grow and capacity is used up by ELT processing
- Lower storage costs as your data volumes grow
- Higher levels of security and business continuity
- Accelerated time to insight with an analytics platform that natively integrates Apache Spark & SQL engines
- Future proof architecture that easily incorporates newest innovations
Beyond the business benefits of running your enterprise data warehouse in the cloud with Azure Synapse, all data professionals can now use a unified experience for data prep, data management, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks. With two ways to analyze data through provisioned workloads or through the severless consumption model that offers pay-per-query functionality, customers can choose the most cost-effective option for each use case. Additionally, when it comes to data, security and privacy are of utmost importance and underpin the insights discovered using analytics. Advanced security and privacy are built into the fabric of Azure Synapse, such as always-on data encryption. For fine-grained access control, businesses can help ensure data stays safe and private using column-level security and native row-level security, as well as dynamic data masking to automatically protect sensitive data in real-time.