How to increase business impact with Power BI and Azure Analytics
“Every digital transformation is going to begin and end with the customer, and I can see that in the minds of every CEO I talk to.” – Marc Benioff, Co-CEO of Salesforce
The era of digital transformation is upon us, and we must jump on the bandwagon, no questions asked. In this time, business around the globe are significantly trying to digitise their business processes and for very good reasons.
• Digital experience for the customer
• Automating the business processes
• Efficient Information management
• Employee efficiency
• Analytics and innovation
The moment we talk about transforming a business from analogue to digital, we must realise that the corner stone of such a transformation is data.
Digital transformation implies that the culture, tools, abilities are built around the data. Business processes revolve around the collection, storing and retrieval of data and the more effective they are, more capable the processes are. Better data culture would mean that the business decisions would be evidence based.
Businesses might think that technology provides the solution to everything. But digital transformation is not about the technology, it is about the business itself. We do not have to subscribe to the state-of-the-art technology to run a successful business. We must adopt an agile, flexible, and future proof solution that is also compatible with the kind of industry that we are in.
Business can only improve through actions taken on insights based on facts and data, which can only be possible if the data is available at one place and extremely accessible. This serves a problem to us as to how to store data without spending large sums of money.
Luckily, it does not take much to start a great reporting and analytics platform. Thanks to cloud platform that enables us by providing technology, security consisting of a plethora of features at a feasible cost.
Microsoft Azure offers a variety of storage and database services that are easy to use, scalable and performant. Azure storage is an account, when subscribed, lets us use multiple services.
Azure storage lets us store all text and binary file, and even unstructured data on Azure blob storage, files of different format for sharing. There is also a table storage in the Azure storage account. The pricing for the storage account depends on the size of the data stored without any upfront or termination cost.
Azure Blob Block storage – $0.00081/GB per month
Azure Table storage starts from $0.045/GB per month
There are also database facilities like Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Data Lake. All of them can be scaled up to massive amounts of data size. There are many other options available as well.
Without visualisation tools, we cannot make sense of the data we have acquired. Hence, we need a visualisation tool that is easy to use and connects to all types of data storages quickly. Power BI is a Microsoft tool that enables us to visualise data to gain deeper data insight. It always to connect to almost any data source that you can think of, allowing us to bring in all kinds of data from different sources for analysis.
It provides numerous options in visuals to better suit the insight that we are trying to get from the data. The visuals are all customisable for better aesthetics. The reports can be shared on the Power BI service for others to see and collaborate, without security concerns.
They have a wonderful support team that release updates every month, getting suggestions from the user. They constantly try and improve the product.
It is easy to learn considering most of the work is drag and drop. Complex data transformations can also be done on Power Bi. The price of Power BI pro account is around $10 which is a steal considering what they offer.
Thus, a simple storage system on cloud and a data visualisation product can go a long way in helping the business make successful and profitable actions through the insight that they gain. This can be done through Microsoft Azure and Power BI which are viable, customisable and extremely cost effective.
