{"id":10521,"date":"2019-06-27T12:48:26","date_gmt":"2019-06-27T19:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10521"},"modified":"2023-06-12T16:14:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T23:14:09","slug":"creating-business-intelligence-with-azure-sql-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/creating-business-intelligence-with-azure-sql-database\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating business intelligence with Azure SQL Database"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Microsoft Azure SQL Database creates a more efficient and reliable solution to gain data insights which are gathered from numerous business systems across the globe for Microsoft Real Estate and Facility (RE&F). With Microsoft Azure SQL Database, RE&F creates a modern data warehouse and data mart to improve access to end-to-end business data, creates business insights for the organization, and uses data and business intelligence to enable digital transformation within RE&F. With the new business intelligence self-serve platform, RE&F has a better method for accessing organizational business intelligence.<\/p>\n

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Microsoft Real Estate and Security (RE&S) needed a more efficient and reliable solution for gaining insights into the data in numerous business systems across the globe. RE&S used Microsoft Azure SQL Database to create a data warehouse and data mart to improve access to end-to-end business data, to create business insights for the organization, and to use data and business intelligence to enable digital transformation within RE&S. With the new business intelligence self-service platform, RE&S has a single source of data, a more secure and reliable data catalog, a more complete view of its business data, and an efficient and user-friendly method for accessing business intelligence.<\/p>\n

Understanding business and data at RE&S<\/h2>\n

Microsoft RE&S manages a real estate portfolio of 580 properties in 112 countries\/regions, comprising more than 33 million square feet. Operating and maintaining this amount of infrastructure is a huge undertaking, and it\u2019s important for us to know the exact status of our facilities to be efficient and to serve the needs of our employees and customers.<\/p>\n

A group of vendor teams manages all our facilities, from changing light bulbs to cutting grass to maintaining elevators to ensuring that heating and cooling systems are running, and the RE&S organization ensures that facilities management processes run smoothly for our entire company.<\/p>\n

Examining the state of RE&S data<\/h3>\n

RE&S and our vendors use many systems to manage our business. In the past, our ability to understand the state of Microsoft facilities depended on the state of the system of record databases that contain our organizational data. We gathered reporting data from these data sources to provide insight into the various RE&S business areas. The vendor-managed data sources in these systems of record weren\u2019t fully accessible by our RE&S business teams. Because these systems were largely owned and managed by vendors, it was often difficult to know who owned each data source and what data the source contained. We couldn\u2019t provide a single source of truth to define end-to-end visibility for our RE&S partners. The data that was needed wasn’t available.<\/p>\n

This represented a significant problem. RE&S is responsible for coordinating a massive global real estate and facilities portfolio, but we couldn\u2019t accurately or efficiently capture the current state of that portfolio. Our reporting systems depended on data from vendor systems that weren\u2019t standardized, and generating even simple reports required time and deep knowledge of these systems. Several specific factors limited our reporting capabilities:<\/p>\n