How a unified data estate enables streamlined operations
Data-driven organizations have a strategic advantage over their competition. They see material growth in worker productivity, top-line revenue, and margin, as well as increased agility around mergers and acquisitions.
Lumen Technologies, a multinational technology company that enables its customers to capitalize on emerging applications, realized they had an opportunity to streamline their operations by unifying its data estate after growing through a series of 20 acquisitions. Getting an overall view of their data was a challenge, as most of it was siloed in legacy databases spread throughout the disconnected systems. Leadership knew they were missing out on valuable insights yet struggled to access it in a meaningful way.
Enter Tammy Nyman, vice president, Shared Services, and Ryan Jones, director, Disconnects and Business Operations. They were tasked by Ophir Rahmani, SVP of Service Delivery at Lumen, to eliminate inefficiencies and streamline processes currently mired in access control issues, throttled networks, and segmented data to improve the services Lumen provides its customers.
“Our customers’ desire for speed and low latency services was really driving change. Old-school ways of sharing and gathering information via phone and email were on their way out. Lumen is a technology company that sells solutions on top of our platform, and the pandemic simply sped up that process.”
– Ophir Rahmani, SVP, Service Delivery, Lumen Technologies
The drive to line up Lumen’s data analytics capabilities with its industry-leading edge computing services resulted in the creation of Intelligent Digital Delivery, or iDD, powered by Azure Synapse Analytics. iDD gives stakeholders across the organization unfettered access to the customer data they need, when they need it, no matter where it originated.
The benefits didn’t stop with powering their real-time data. Now that Lumen had streamlined its analytics platform, Nyman and Jones saw ways to integrate Synapse Analytics into the company’s predictive modeling as well. By building Lumen’s data platform on scalable Azure technologies, the possibilities are expansive.
As Lumen discovered, it can be hard to know what is possible without first knowing what you have available.
Azure Purview is a platform that I personally am excited and passionate about. Data governance is historically very manual and complex to manage. Purview simplifies this through an automated environment scanning process to “cast a net” across your data estate. It uses world-class Microsoft AI to classify the data it scans, map data throughout your organization, and makes it available through a simple portal right inside Azure Synapse.
This comprehensive platform convergence is quite unique in the market. Azure Purview is now generally available and free to scan both SQL Server on-premises and Power BI estates. If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to watch the announcement here and give Azure Purview a try
Now through March 31, 2022, customers can enjoy up to 1 TB of free queries per month on Azure Synapse Serverless, our pay-per-query cloud data warehouse solution, as well as 120 vCore-hours per month of Apache Spark pools inside Azure Synapse for free.
