What sets resilient organisations apart? Why are some organisations better suited to meet sudden disruptions? Only those that can harness the power of all their data will continue to thrive; turning disruptions into opportunities.

In order to work effectively, these businesses need a secure, scalable data service that can integrate data from any source – this is where we recommend and implement Azure Synapse for the best chance of success.

General Availability of Azure Synapse Analytics

Microsoft have announced the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics – a limitless analytics service with unmatched time to insights that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics all into a single service. Azure Synapse combines capabilities spanning the needs of data engineering, machine learning and BI without creating silos in processes and tools.

Azure Synapse is the next stage of evolution in Microsoft’s cloud-based data warehousing service. Bringing together enterprise level data warehousing with Big Data analytics, it gives users the ability to gain insight from all their data with a unified visual workspace that takes you from data ingestion to advanced AI tasks. What’s more, with Microsoft’s industry-leading performance, data professionals can query large-volume relational and non-relational data at speed and scale up as needed.

At Coeo, we see our most data literate customers encouraging collaboration whilst ensuring high standards for corporate, personal and customer data protection and privacy. Azure Synapse assists with this with built-in fine-grained access control, protecting sensitive data in real time. Services in the Azure cloud also benefit from advanced security features including always-on data encryption and automated threat detection.

Breaking down silos

Data silos exist in many businesses, either due to the location and types of data, the teams responsible for different parts of the analytics process or the tools used by the data professionals involved.

To harness the power of data, first organisations need to break down data silos. While not a new concept, achieving this has been a constant challenge in the history of data and analytics as its ecosystem continues to be complex and heterogeneous. Organisations must break down all silos to harness the full power of data and analytics, in a unified, secure, and compliant manner.

We see great benefit in moving to Azure Synapse as it enables a truly unified data function. This advanced analytics service gives you:

• The ability to analyse structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data all in one place
• A unified service that brings data lakes, data warehouses and analytics together
• A unified workspace for data engineers, database administrators, data scientists, IT pros and business analysts

The Azure Synapse Studio encompasses data preparation, data management, data warehousing, big data and AI tasks. Database administrators familiar with T-SQL can continue to use those familiar with SQL can continue to use it as they run multiple workloads and escalate resources as needed, whilst business analysts can build Power BI dashboards in minutes. Data professionals who prefer Python, Scala, SparkSQL or .Net can work with these, whilst data engineers benefit from an intuitive code-free visual environment to build and manage data pipelines.

What does this mean for your business?

The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview enables organizations to develop the capabilities needed to empower their teams to leverage all data for analytics and data governance, silo-free.

Coeo are increasingly implementing Azure Synapse Analytics for customers who want to accelerate their data maturity. The combination of high-performance capability and the simplicity of one unified data and analytics platform makes it the obvious cloud data service choice.

High performance

Microsoft have invested in the scalability and performance of Azure Data Services and Azure Synapse demonstrates externally benchmarked performance improvements against both competitor platforms and its predecessor Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Features such as the ability to prioritise resources for specific business groups or individual users guarantee real-time analysis for business-critical reports.

Simplicity & interoperability

Coeo's customers customers value both the simplicity of having all their data within a single data platform, but also the interoperability and connectivity that brings. The Azure Synapse workspace is familiar for all data users, whether they come from the IT professional end or are the end consumer of reporting and analysis. The ability to ingest, prepare and analyse all kinds of data in one place creates efficiency and reduces the chance for error – businesses achieve a true ‘single pane of glass’ data view.

Using one platform also makes training and roll-out more straightforward, and integration with familiar reporting tools like Power BI make the insights gained truly self-service, giving businesses what they need to drive data-drive innovation.

To understand more about Azure Synapse Analytics and the way Coeo can help you deploy, roll out and fully leverage your data, visit our technology page or fill out the form below.

You can also expand your knowledge by signing up for Analytics in a Day - a free, online workshop run by Coeo on behalf of Microsoft.