88% Cost Savings Through Data-Driven Decision-Making with Azure Self-Serve Analytics

Challenge 

Adastra has been working with our client over the last four years to create and implement their modernization roadmap.  

Our client was facing challenges with their on-premises solution, which couldn’t perform the advanced analytics they required to optimize their reactor units and head office solutions. Their current data was siloed, and they were doing manual work to integrate data sources, putting strain on internal resources.  

Their solution needed to address the following: allow them to implement self-serve reporting and analytics for data-driven decision-making, to develop a robust data and technical governance strategy and to access the latest versions of the software, apps and tools they use every day.  

Solution 

After laying the groundwork by creating the roadmap and assessing several cloud platforms via a scoring model that assessed the ease of transition, maintainability and sustainability, our client was ready to modernize its infrastructure. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform with Synapse proved to be the leading solution.  

Our client was eager to work with Adastra again based on our expertise and experience in the data analytics space. From the beginning stages of the project, Adastra was able to overcome a steep learning curve in their technically niche space and establish relationships with the client as well as their partners. 

Adastra implemented an Azure enterprise data service platform using Azure Synapse. With strict security requirements, we designed a cloud-focused data governance structure and roadmap, allowing our client to enable authorized end-users to gain access to data sets directly. The data governance strategy allowed for data to be secure, accessible, trustworthy, and defined.  

Adastra created a data governance Centre of Excellence (COE), which worked to clean up the client’s current BI reports with proper data modelling and created a pipeline that pulled data straight from the source. We also enhanced their dashboards to provide all the analytical data they needed to make accurate, data-driven decisions.   

Impact  

The engagement has allowed our client to remove data silos with a single-source-of-truth database to leverage, eliminating a lot of the manual work they were performing, and freeing up the time of internal resources to focus on business innovation. The project was quick and efficient, as Adastra delivered on budget, on time and in scope and the client has reduced their investment in on-premises systems, saving money on licensing and maintenance. 

Adastra’s solution is a configurable, decoupled, highly flexible, reusable and expandable platform. This has enabled our client’s support team to quickly ingest new tables, adjust existing pipelines or develop new patterns. The solution has been very reliably executed in the production system and has been able to:

• Scale databases in as little as 30 minutes
• Reduce application data sizes by an average of 74%
• Complete 9763 successful runs in 24 hours
• Provide daily delta lake history audit trails
• Support downstream applications, development, testing, code repository and deployment pipelines
• Reduce the amount of programming time for basic integrations with standardized and automated processes
• Isolate workloads so that business lines are working in their own environment rather than sharing resources
• Use dynamic programming in one centralized system pipeline – no need to change programming in multiple locations

The new platform has a small but robust support team to take care of development, deployment and production support. The team now is on a routine execution mode that is integrated with both our client’s production deployment policy and DevSecOps practice.

Adastra’s solution has set our client up to implement other Microsoft services, including upgrading their cloud environment, adopting Power Apps, providing support on Azure IoT and the new platform, and creating an architecture diagram.