Analytics Modernization on Azure: One Size Does Not Fit All
Discover Four Customer Journeys to a Cloud Data Warehouse or Data Lake on Azure
A modern analytics strategy built on a strong data foundation is the key to success for modern enterprise businesses. But how do you achieve that foundation? A recent Harvard Business Review survey of global executives found that80percent of respondentssay their organizations are struggling to become mature users of data and analytics, and 45percent say theirorganizations operate on-premises IT systems that are at or near performance capacity. To help overcome these challenges and modernize their approach to enterprise data and analytics, many businesses are moving to cloud data warehouses or data lakes.
Every company takes a unique approach to modernization. Whatever path you follow, achieving that goal requires more than just shifting workloads to the cloud. Without integrated enterprise data management that is metadata driven, built for the cloud, and works across hybrid environments, your initiative may fail. Below are the stories of how four organizations successfully increased agility, flexibility, and scalability by using Informatica’s intelligent, automated data management solution to build a modern data platform on Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse) and/or Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS).
Achieving Higher Analytics Accuracy
Kelly Services, a leader in the temporary-staffing industry, expedited their talent-selection process with a modern and connected talent platform for hybrid architectures. The company drove faster application development to support job placements with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS), Master Data Management, and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
Kelly Services migrated multiple legacy on-premises data warehousestoAzure Synapse to create an agile, flexible analytics architecture that provides a complete view of candidates. The organization integrated data from customer and partner systems to facilitate greater data mining and insights. By modernizing their data analytics approach, the company achieved 99.99% accuracyin identifying duplicates and faster application development to support job placements. To learn more about Kelly Services’ journey, read this blog post and check out their video and success story.
“Informatica and Microsoft each invest considerably in their platforms and technologies, and that benefits me as a customer. They integrate their products in a way that creates the flexibility and agility we need.”
Ravi Ginjupalli, Senior Director, BI Analytics, Kelly Services
Scaling to Meet Future Business Needs
Similarly, a commercial healthcare business was using an eight-year old, on-premises data warehouse applianceto store data from multiple areas, including supply chain, finance, quality, and commercial. The appliance suffered from poor performance, was costly to maintain, and required six people to curate data.
The company wanted to modernize by moving to a cloud-based data warehouse solution, eliminating the future need to deal with end-of-support hardware and giving them more functionality and scale. They selected Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services to migrate their on-premises data warehouse appliance to Azure Synapse.
The new cloud platform on Azure will provide more agility, with the ability to integrate more data sources than they were able to with their on-premises system, enabling them to easily scale to meet new business needs in the future. In addition to lower licensing costs compared to the on-premises data warehouse, the cloud-based solution will provide high availability and eliminate on-premises maintenance tasks, allowing administrators to focus on more value-added IT services.
Feeding Predictive Analytics
A global transportation company wanted to improve and accelerate data governancewhile tracking end-to-end data lineage and empowering users to easily locate data with a simple search. The global firm needed to enable data analysts and business usersto prepare cataloged data for analysis without help from IT.
The company is modernizing their infrastructure with a cloud data lake on Azure using Azure Data Lake Storage and Informatica Data Engineering Integration, Data Quality, and Multidomain MDM solutions to integrate, verify, and deduplicate data from ships and legacy systems. They also used Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog to discover and rapidly source data assets from across the enterprise and Informatica Enterprise Data Preparation to prepare cataloged data for analysis.
The company can now better choose the best routes and ports and more accurately forecast demand by using the data lake to feed predictive analytics and machine learning models with timely, high-quality data from hundreds of diverse sources from on-premises systems. These include booking systems, container terminals, financial systems, Teradata data warehouses, and telematics data from ships at sea.
The organization is also now able to more accurately track customer cargos, reduce costs, and maintain a competitive edge. The company is saving 90% of employee time previously spent on manual data discovery and governance, resulting in 10x faster processes.
Building a 360-Degree View of Customers and Brokers
As one of the world’s largest property and casualty commercial lines insurers, AXA XL needed to overcome a number of challenges, including: a lack of trust in datadue to ongoing issues around accuracy, completeness, and consistency; an increased costin maintaining siloed data repositories; alimited ability to leverage existing data repositoriesfor additional initiatives; and limited insights into their customers and brokers, which hindered AXA XL from serving their holistic needs.
The solution? Create a cloud-based advanced analytics platform on Azure Data Lake Storage to integrate submission and quote data and build out a 360-degree view of the customer and the broker, as well as the status of policies to enable transparent resource planning for underwriting assistants. The company used Informatica Data Engineering Integration (formerly Big Data Management) and Informatica Data Engineering Quality (formerly Big Data Quality) to integrate, govern, and cleanse data from on-premises and cloud sources; Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog to scan and catalog insured and policy data across the enterprise; and Enterprise Data Preparation to enable data scientists, actuaries, and analysts to prepare data for analysis via self-service.
The results speak for themselves. AXA XL now has robust analysis and quicker decisionsaround growth opportunities through M&A and introduction of new products. They’ve also lowered their expense ratio through enhanced claims segmentation and risk-exposure analysis and are enjoying improved investment returns using risk-adjusted measures to evaluate investment performance. Get more details on AXA XL’s journey with this success story.
“Informatica and Microsoft Azure, they work well together, they support one another, and we ended up with what we wanted: a single cloud footprint that goes across technologies and functions.”
John Mulvaney Senior CoE Lead - Data Analytics Workbench AXA XL
Providing Unmatched Value
Informatica provides industry leading, metadata-driven, scalable enterprise-class data migration, integration, and data quality and governance solutions that add depth and power to the Azure platform. These solutions offer seamless access, delivery, and control of secure, trusted, governed data between any cloud or on-premises data source and Microsoft Azure data services.
Together, Informatica and Microsoft provide unmatched value to our joint customers. Our strong and long-standing partnership puts you in a position to get the most value out of your cloud data platform to drive transformation at the speed of business. We’re prepared to help you intelligently lead—in any sector, category, or niche.
Sign Up Now for Our Joint Proof of Value
Informatica and Microsoft are now offering a free, two-week joint proof-of-value (POV) engagement for qualified customers. Executed by experienced Microsoft and Informatica cloud data warehousing experts, the POV demonstrates how to quickly and cost-effectively address the scaling pain points of on-premises data warehouses by adopting Azure Synapse in an iterative approach. This strategy delivers business wins quickly while enabling the agile, iterative modernization of existing data pipelines to fully tap into the analytics power of Azure Synapse and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.
For more information on this joint offer
Learn more about Informatica Solutions for Azure at Informatica.com/azure
