Drive Better Business Decisions With Microsoft Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse
Data warehouses continue to offer a valued source of insight for corporate decision-makers, but they can often be complex, costly and inflexible. For companies struggling to maintain the availability, relevance and performance of data warehouses, Microsoft offers an SQL Data Warehouse on the Azure cloud. This solution delivers enterprise-class scaleability, reliability, performance and flexibility on a pay-as-you-use basis.
Adapting to a changing world
For many businesses, data warehousing represents a significant sunk investment in a complex technical solution. Just keeping such a solution in good working order is challenging and costly; adapting it to the demands of big data and real-time business is even harder.
No-one wants to discard past investment in what remains a strategic asset, but the additional cost and risk of updating an on-premises data warehouse may be hard to justify.
Key challenges
Rising data volumes and user numbers impact performance and spare capacity, potentially requiring significant ongoing capital investments in server, storage and network hardware. Even where the data warehouse is performing well, it may not be sufficiently protected against downtime.
Day-to-day maintenance of the platform may also be a headache, particularly where it is not practical to maintain the necessary specialist skills in-house.
Look to the clouds
Microsoft’s Azure SQL data warehouse addresses these challenges, providing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) running on Azure. The solution delivers true cloud elasticity, enabling companies to flex their data warehousing resources up or down in a matter of seconds as requirements change.
The massively parallel architecture of Microsoft’s SQL Data Warehouse gives it exceptional capabilities in processing and analysing huge volumes of data at high speed, and built-in geo-redundancy and snapshot options provide easy business continuity.
To find out more, read Northdoor’s short introduction to Microsoft’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
