Over the past year, it’s become clear that no business is immune to sudden changes. Embracing data as a strategic asset is key to remaining agile amidst uncertainty. Data can provide crucial insights to help you navigate complex situations, empower your employees to make better decisions, and create new customer experiences.
The benefits to getting this right are significant. Harvard Business Review found that organizations that embrace data to drive transformations experience a 54 percent growth in revenue and profits, 62 percent enhancement to customer satisfaction, and 44 percent faster time to market, relative to their peers. Azure data offers limitless scale and performance for your most mission-critical workloads—and limitless possibilities for what you can achieve.
Data: The strategic asset of our time
Using the right technology, it’s possible to harness your organization’s data, even in today’s world where data volume, variety, and velocity are accelerating dramatically.
Walgreens serves eight million customers every day, generating huge volumes of data. Analytics turn this data into insights, which inform inventory management and help Walgreens understand which products customers want. When its on-premises data warehouse faced limits, Walgreens migrated to Azure Synapse Analytics.
“With Azure Synapse, we were able to create a platform that is streamlined, scalable, elastic, and cost effective, enabling business users to make the right decisions for the fast-paced market.”—Anne Cruz, IT Manager for Supply Chain and Merchandising, Walgreens
Using Azure Synapse, Walgreens improved operations and modernized its business processes, achieving three times the performance at one-third of the cost of its on-premises data warehouse.
Another example is Symantec, which turned to Azure Cosmos DB to overcome the limits of its on-premises solution. As a cybersecurity company, high availability and low latency were critical requirements, as was scale—Symantec monitors 40 million endpoints in 150 countries. The migration required just 11 lines of code changes, and Symantec can now respond to 15 billion requests a day in under one second, all while saving 40 percent compared to their previous solution.
“Our customers trust us to protect them throughout their ecosystem. So we needed a partner that we could trust to deliver a highly reliable service with ultra-low worldwide latency at a reasonable cost.”—Mike Shavell, Technical Director and Architect, Symantec
Walgreens and Symantec have embraced data as a strategic asset and benefit from limitless scale and performance with Azure data. Azure is up to 3.6 times faster and 86 percent less expensive than AWS Relational Database Service for SQL workloads, and Azure Analytics is up to 14 times faster and 94 percent less expensive than Google BigQuery.
Creating a data culture
Establishing technological capabilities is one piece of the puzzle, but equally important are your organization’s people and processes. Cultural changes are often necessary to drive true transformation, and according to new research from Keystone Strategy, there are clear cultural patterns seen across technologically mature organizations. Organizations with strong data cultures adopt a growth mindset towards risk and continuous learning, leverage data to facilitate collaboration and decision-making, empower their teams to use data to measure performance, and use common targets and objective measurements to align across the company.
When you have a data-driven culture and the right technology in place, there are no limits to what you can achieve. GlaxoSmithKline has embraced digital transformation to help fight disease and save lives around the globe. Combining the power of Azure data with a data-driven culture is helping GlaxoSmithKline keep its global supply chain resilient, enable employees to work together in new ways, improve clinical trial recruitment, and even combat COVID-19.
“The most important thing data is transforming is our very purpose as a company – it’s innovation. Parallel advances in technology and biology are completely changing both the data that we use and the way we’re able to use it.”—Emma Walmsley, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline
Learn how you can drive data-driven transformation within your organization
Learn more about how leading organizations are using Azure data, and explore insights to help you drive successful data-driven transformations.