For a fast-growing business in a fast-changing world not having enough data is rarely an issue. Quite the opposite. Decision-makers are often confronted with sets upon sets of unorganized and unrefined facts coming at them from various sources in a myriad of different formats at speeds and volumes too great to keep up with. When you reach such a point, it’s time to call your team of trusted IT advisors and task them with crafting a tailored Azure Data Factory solution that will help you extract meaningful and actionable insights from heaps of unprocessed data.
As things stand today, it’s simply critical for businesses to harness the potential dormant in data at their disposal. However, there’s no point in hoarding facts, if you don’t have the tools to make them useful on a tactical or strategic level. This is where Azure Data Factory enters the fray. It’s a cloud-based service that offers an avenue to set-up and manage efficient pipelines that funnel raw data from various and often disconnected sources through an integration and processing faze that makes them readable for the end user participating in a decision-making process.
With the help of a team of capable IT advisors, Azure Data Factory can be adjusted to the specific needs of any company dealing with large amounts of fast accumulating data. Think for instance of a booming e-commerce business facing a veritable deluge in this department. What’s worse, everything is scattered across various and often isolated niches, such as CRM systems, social media, project management platforms, and communication tools. The goal is to aid the decision-makers in making sense of it all and discovering previously unseen patterns or emerging trends. At this point, the IT advisor must work closely with the client to identify his specific data processing needs. After a period of intensive workshops and consultation, a pipeline may be designed that collects data from all the disparate sources, aggregates it, and after turning it into easily digestible formats, ships it for consumption. Azure Data Factory can be integrated with other services like Azure Machine Learning and Power BI to provide the company with a complete end-to-end data processing and analytics solution.
Equipped with such a tool, the e-commerce company can plow through data sets with a good chance of striking gold when it comes to gaining real-time insights into its own operations and the behavior of its customers. The fluctuations in employee performance become trackable, the reliability of sales forecasting increases, the capability to target potential customers improves. Every department is benefiting in its own way. The marketing team can use the new insights to optimize customer engagement, the sales team is able to discover and exploit unexpected cross-selling opportunities. Well-designed and successfully deployed data processing systems are easily scalable and can be adjusted as needed as the company continues to grow. By working with a team of trusted IT advisors, the e-commerce company obtained a tailored Azure Data Factory solution that meets its specific needs and gives it a competitive edge.
A capable IT consulting partner can help businesses in integrating and refining scattered facts that could otherwise overwhelm decision-makers in a fast-paced business environment. A tailored Azure Data Factory solution unburdens leaders from the necessity of combing through heaps of unprocessed data. It allows them to focus on setting new directions based on knowledge derived from well-organized business intelligence.
Tomasz Gil, Azure Developer at Directio