Azure Synapse Analytics And Agility Ebook
Modern Analytics and Governance at Scale A transformative approach to building a modern, end-to-end analytics ecosystem aligned to data mesh, data fabric and data hub Who this is for: Data leaders within organisations that are undergoing digital transformation who want a proven approach to building an end-to-end data analytics ecosystem. Executive summary In today’s organisation, data is at the centre of the universe, propelling digital transformations forward. But it’s not just data behind transformation. It’s the analytics and intelligence that consume the data and power applications, as well as the culture, people and processes that bring them to life. Given all the interrelated pieces, organisations need clear priorities when building a unified analytics ecosystem. It comes down to having the right business goals for transformation, foundational elements to anchor the design and a phased implementation plan that offers room to grow and evolve. This white paper outlines those components and simplifies the journey to a unified analytics ecosystem. Guiding the way to modern analytics are three over-arching business priorities. First, organisations want to accelerate the creation of value from their data to stay competitive. To do so, they must find operational efficiencies and simplify architectures to make it easier to create new data products that drive business decisions. However, the ability to create new data products can’t be a privilege held in only a few departments. Organisations need to empower all personas with the data they need, regardless of their roles. Responsibly democratising data, which is the second priority, makes data and tools widely accessible for all users to foster collaboration and innovation. Of course, neither of these priorities is possible without breaking down silos between business units, which is the final objective – to unify data. With enterprise data governance that makes data discoverable, a hub that contains all data, and domains where business users can collaborate, different parts of the organisation can share and integrate information to build meaningful insights.
Modern Analytics and Governance at Scale To achieve these priorities, Microsoft developed Modern Analytics and Governance (MAG) at Scale. Broken down into the following three solution pillars, this approach outlines the foundational elements that organisations need to transform, along with practical considerations for executing each section. Enterprise data governance: the set of policies and practices used to discover, describe and manage data to accelerate responsible data democratisation. Data governance ties together the data and analytics stack and automates data operations, such as cataloguing, classification, creating lineage and applying security through policies. Without it, organisations limit their ability to innovate and unlock new insights. • This section reviews key components typically involved with data governance policies to help you start planning for how to standardise across your organisation. Data management foundation: the practices and processes that help you create efficiencies with ingesting, storing, protecting and ultimately serving data to different domains in the organisation. • This section provides recommendations on foundational implementations to help you manage and use your data effectively and efficiently throughout its lifecycle. Domains and data products: the environments and services that enable your business units to fully use their data. This looks at how to empower lines of business (LOBs) to self-serve data and analytics in a way that enables non-technical users to access, analyse and build data insights or data products on their own. • This section provides an overview of the different analytics patterns and services you can provide domain users to help them shape and present data in a way that is consumable and actionable for them. Together, these three solution pillars combine to help organisations achieve MAG at Scale. By first setting business priorities as the guiding North Star, then implementing aspects from each solution pillar, your organisation can shift into a whole new paradigm of doing business that empowers everyone to work toward a common goal fuelled by data.
