EY scales its assurance services to new heights using Microsoft Alliance and Fabric

With today’s exponential speed of change, many businesses scramble to stay on top of the growing volume and complexity of data and increasing number of technology options available. Rather than just managing data, they need to transform it into decision-making information of value to guide better business decisions, ensure compliance with regulatory mandates and help increase financial discipline. This is needed at all levels, from small businesses to large, complex organizations.

EY Assurance plays a pivotal role in addressing this challenge and pairing integration of advanced technology, such as predictive analytics, process mining and benchmarking, with broader audit and advisory capabilities, to help maximize the use of both financial and nonfinancial data. It has simplified data access to more fully leverage a company’s technology, reduce administrative burden, and unlock new data capabilities to help provide deeper insights across a broader spectrum of information. Together, these services provide insight and objectivity through a commitment to quality. They also help build confidence in businesses and the capital markets and help protect and promote sustainable, long-term value for stakeholders.

Transforming technology for assurance services  

EY Assurance is continuously helping optimize its service delivery processes by integrating and transforming technology capabilities. In 2022, EY Assurance announced a specific investment program to help integrate and transform its assurance technology platform, which currently supports more than 500,000 EY professionals and external users and is powered by Microsoft Azure. Every client engagement represents a separate and unique data supply chain with multiple datasets that can range from thousands to billions of records, continuing to push the limit of the definition of “enterprise scale.”

To address these challenges and transform the user experience by further incorporating data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and reporting capabilities directly into the workflow of the EY Assurance technology platform, EY Assurance and the wider EY organization, expanded its relationship with Microsoft to deploy a next-generation solution based on Microsoft Fabric. One goal is to transform the user experience by further incorporating data analytics, AI, and reporting capabilities directly into the workflow of the EY Assurance technology platform.

The first foundational step achieved was the migration of EY Canvas—a single workflow, communication, and documentation hub for EY audit engagements worldwide—onto Microsoft Azure, which transitioned many of its on-premises services into the cloud. As a fast follow in 2022, EY Assurance began integrating and transforming EY Helix, its global analytics suite, to further embed analytics and data into the service delivery process and to expand its capabilities. EY Helix analytics are mission-critical to explore and understand entire populations and different layers of data across financial processes in order to derive a more complete view of business activity and assess underlying risks.

“The technology was market-leading, but we knew there were additional opportunities to make it even better. EY teams see that we can expand the level of integration and increase the use of advancements in AI and other technologies to gain additional insights and unlock further potential within data,” says Andreas Toggwyler, Partner, EY Global Assurance Technology Officer.

Some of the key goals for EY Assurance include the ability to:

• Achieve sub-second response at enterprise scale for data-intensive processes involving up to tens of billions of records.
• Provide self-service capabilities that would allow auditors to adjust for local or engagement-specific requirements, such as data sovereignty.
• Visualize data more effectively with intuitive user interfaces and use data during client meetings to support more effective and collaborative client interactions.
• Increase the efficiency of the overall data supply chain, increasing the speed at which its assurance professionals can get access to their client’s data.

One of the biggest challenges for the EY organization is the complexity and size of the data supply chain.

“The data supply chain is arguably one of the most difficult in the world,” says Michel Porter, Partner, EY Global Assurance Analytics Leader. “The sheer volume of clients we have and datasets that we process, some of which are in the billions of records, creates an enterprise-level data supply chain at a massive scale. The data access and transformation processes, reflecting on various source systems and clients’ customizations, and the demanding data consumption patterns, need to work seamlessly together in a highly automated fashion. We don’t have weeks from the time that a client provides us access to data to when it needs to be analyzed; expectations on timelines and turnaround are high, in particular, during the intense period of financial statement close processes for clients.”

Simplifying the data supply chain

Through its ongoing alliance relationship with Microsoft, the EY organization became aware that Microsoft was developing Microsoft Fabric, a product that ties together multiple tools, including Power BI, Azure Data Factory, the next generation of Azure Synapse Analytics, and a unified data lake, called OneLake. It concluded that this new product would be a welcome solution for complex data supply chain needs. Microsoft Fabric is now being used to further integrate analytics into its service delivery process and helps to ensure all capabilities work together seamlessly and optimally. By bringing together disparate data sources, Fabric creates a single source in OneLake, which is highly protected by built-in security and governance capabilities and can be used with multiple analytics tools.

“The orchestration layer is one of the big reasons why Microsoft Fabric is so attractive,” says Porter. “Historically, we spent a lot of time on integration and ensuring all the various pieces of technology talked to each other efficiently and effectively. With Microsoft Fabric, we can enable better integration patterns as historically siloed products are now seamlessly woven together. Microsoft Fabric brings the pieces together for us to provide a better integrated solution that aligns with our investment strategy in next-generation assurance technology.”

The partnership between the EY organization and Microsoft goes beyond the new analytics platform, as it was able to add a unique perspective on how specific features could be used. “We have spent a substantial amount of time with the Microsoft cloud solution architecture team talking through exactly how we're using a product, or series of products, and the reasons why we need certain changes. They have consistently responded quickly with features and ideas that reflect our input,” says Porter.

As part of its preview of Microsoft Fabric, the global EY organization is also developing several additional proof-of-concepts.

“One of the biggest changes with Microsoft Fabric is that we will no longer have to import data into memory, which allows us to expedite our overall data supply chain, while creating and expanding our own custom supply chains,” adds Porter.

Organization-wide, the EY organization is formulating dozens of use cases for Semantic Link, a new Microsoft Fabric feature released for public preview in early October 2023. Semantic Link allows users to establish a connection between Power BI datasets and Synapse Data Science in Microsoft Fabric. This connection will help EY teams unlock the potential of Power BI data beyond traditional business intelligence, making it accessible to additional downstream assets through notebooks.

Achieving higher-quality audits

The EY organization’s investment of more than US$1B in a next generation assurance technology platform is part of a sustained commitment to help deliver high-quality audits, and to support rapidly changing expectations of regulators, governments, standard setters, audit committees, and boards across the financial and nonfinancial reporting agenda.

With the OneLake unified data lake in Microsoft Fabric, EY teams have a single source of truth for an entire client or company that can be used with multiple analytics tools. This allows all authorized users to work from the same accurate, certified, datasets, providing higher-quality, more consistent, and up-to-date information for audit conclusions.

The EY organization expects Semantic Link to further enhance those capabilities. “With Semantic Link, we can take what someone is looking at in Power BI and send information elsewhere and do additional calculations and actions, using Python for example, which uses Azure Synapse Analytics or Azure Databricks to create additional workflows,” says Porter. “That means a linear supply chain can now become circular and therefore faster and more robust, providing greater transparency, quality, and clarity through enhanced data capabilities.”

Taking advantage of Microsoft Fabric, EY teams can focus on the value they help deliver and what's next rather than putting the effort into buying, configuring, and linking separate products. “Our goal is a highly integrated solution that unlocks transformation opportunities, enhances the quality and efficiency of the analytics, and helps accelerate the end-to-end delivery process,” notes Porter.

Expediting the data supply chain

Once EY Assurance moves its data supply chains to Microsoft Fabric, it will move away from importing data into memory and instead use DirectLake. This will reduce data supply chain processing time. Because the data will be available from multiple sources virtually, in near real time through OneLake, it will help reduce costly data replication in addition to memory and compute requirements for EY teams.

EY professionals will also be able to collaborate with clients in person using data in real time. This will drive more collaborative relationships.

Providing secure and democratized data access 

The governed data foundation and role-based access provided by Microsoft Fabric will ensure that EY professionals can meet stringent security governance requirements, while easily using the tools and data they need for their specific job role. EY teams can share information more securely with authorized internal and external colleagues, while preventing unauthorized users from discovering sensitive data.

“It’s not merely change in technology for the sake of change, but rather a purposeful transformation that brings about meaningful improvements. EY teams want to expand using Microsoft Fabric capabilities to unlock new use cases, such as further deploying AI and embedding advanced capabilities directly into the overall workflow, with quality of our services being top of mind,” says Toggwyler.

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