Creating Modern Enterprise Data Analytics Platform in
Azure Cloud

Success Story

Scalefocus partnered with a rapidly growing technology company to build an Enterprise Data Analytics Platform. Our client lacked a dedicated data team and struggled to get a comprehensive view of their business performance due to the massive amount of data, split into various silos and with questionable quality. Scalefocus developed the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform, hosting different use cases that keeps all data in one place and provides a single version of truth and data analytics to various company units. The modern platform collects and interprets data from multiple sources to enable fast, user-friendly dashboards and ad-hoc functionalities for achieving data-driven decision-making.

The Client

A large multinational software corporation that specializes in enterprise software solutions. The company provides a wide range of software products and services to help businesses of all sizes manage their projects, processes, applications, and IT infrastructure. This includes integration platforms, application management, and business process targeted to the B2B market segment. The software solutions and platforms help business partners to streamline their operations and improve efficiency.

The Challenge

Our client was growing rapidly, and while the company had many IT personnel, there was no dedicated data analytics team to establish, develop and bring to life a sustainable and efficient data strategy across the organization. Key departments like sales, legal, finance and IT operations operated in data silos without an integrated data storage and analytics solution. Each unit did things its own way, leading to a multitude of fragmented reports that were difficult to unify. Data access, confidentiality and security aspects on all layers were also highly important as the client was determined to establish a highly secured environment and apply a wide variety of best practices and security audit recommendations.

To address these challenges, the company needed to create a centralized data analytics solution that collects data from various sources and comprehensively unifies, validates and enriches it, applying complex KPIs calculation. The platform had to set a common approach for the future development of new use cases.

The Solution

Scalefocus designed an Enterprise data analytics platform and provided business consulting services, helping our client to identify and prioritize their needs and requirements. We modernized their data capabilities with Microsoft Azure Cloud to unlock multiple advanced analytics functionalities. The team was also involved in consultancy, mentoring, knowledge transfers and peer-to-peer programming to help the client build a knowledgeable internal data unit.

One of the critical use cases was workflow and performance tracking of the sales process. Various fragmented source systems were involved, and the process was not streamlined in terms of unification & cross-system dependencies. We successfully integrated several core systems like Salesforce, Contract Management, Global Deal desk and Escriba, allowing the client to see all relevant information in one place. The most valuable asset of the solution was tracking the sequence, multiple iterations and versions created during the pre-sales activities. The easy-to-use visualizations provided quick high-level and granular views to investigate the sales process duration, status, blocked and delayed steps.

Another use case was regarding personal laptops, servers and virtual machines vulnerability scans, missing patches, and security compliance. The initial scans were performed via different software across different types of devices. The results were unified, cleaned and enriched with multiple metrics and KPIs, enabling the IT Security team and each employee to have a comprehensive monitoring on company policy compliance and possible security breaches.

Another challenging aspect of the project was the design of their Sustainability reporting, which involved tracking over 480 different key performance indicators (KPIs) from nearly 20 business units. Most of the KPIs were not tracked in any existing system. We crafted an initial data-capturing solution that communicates with many business units and can structure, store and track their data. Information like electricity bills, carbon footprint, inclusion reports, and charity information was currently living in personal excel files, emails or just in people’s heads. The Sustainability data-capturing solution also had interfaces to other existing systems, where some of the KPIs were available and possible for fully machine-to-machine integration, like financial results from SAP, University programs membership, eLearning courses, Vendor management, etc. The entire solution was fully customizable regarding KPIs specifications, formulas, adding new KPIs, etc. All these actions are enabled as out of the box, easy-to-use configuration, which does not require additional development and IT Team involvement.

All use cases were coupled with version control and automated DevOps (CI/CD) deployment processes across environments. Our DataOps experts improved the agility and quality of data analytics processes through automation, continuous integration and delivery, and monitoring and feedback loops.

Our team also created a Proof of Concept for Purview – a Microsoft data governance tool. The challenge was connectivity setup and enabling lineage between multiple cloud components and alignment with company security policy. Since the tool was newly released, we collaborated closely with Microsoft development teams as their direct implementation partner. We were involved in verifying our findings about the tool’s functionalities, performance and restrictions. The proposed concept was targeted as a primary instrument to support Data Stewards in their duties for Governance and monitoring of the solution.

The Enterprise data analytics platform is built entirely on Azure cloud components – Blob storages, Azure SQL as analytical databases, Azure Data Factory as the main ETL tool for extracting, transforming and curating data, and Azure Databricks to solve more complex data manipulation scenarios. We utilized Power BI to build interactive dashboards and visualize reports and data for insights and decision-making. The entire solution architecture follows Microsoft’s security best practices, ensuring a secure and bulletproof connection across components.

The Benefits

Scalefocus built a comprehensive Enterprise data analytics solution that enabled the company to make data-driven decisions, identify areas for improvement and boost business performance. We enabled the company to deliver high-quality data to stakeholders faster, with a consistent and clean core data model, and in a more automated fashion. Ultimately, we achieved a high degree of reusability of the platform for the upcoming use cases.

The client adopted our solution as a foundation and standard for future internal implementations. The Enterprise data analytics platform can meet the client’s evolving needs while providing reusability, scalability, and cost optimization.

Improved decision making – the client can derive insights from their data, enabling them to make informed decisions that positively impact their bottom line.

Clear visibility – reliable instrument for identifying data quality issues and future improvement areas.

Scalability – multiple Microsoft Azure Cloud components, unified and integrated into a grid allowing flexibility, scalability, easy maintenance and monitoring.

New business insights – Visualized company performance KPIs, trends and insights.

A benchmark for future initiatives – established concept, architecture, guidelines, and best practices for further internal development.