Data Platform Consulting Consultancy Services

Data Platform Consultancy Service

PTR offers expert data platform consulting services to help businesses optimise their data infrastructure and make informed decisions. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner AI & Azure Data with over 30 years of experience of working with data platforms we are well placed to assist with the selection of the most suitable data platform for your data solutions.

We assist clients with consolidating fragmented departmental data into a cohesive cloud infrastructure to establish a reliable, single source of truth. We bridge the gaps and reduce financial risk by building scalable, future-proof platforms.

We work across a wide variety of industries, and from small to large data management and data analytics solutions. Just within the Microsoft world there are many choices of data platforms catering for all sizes of business and organisations and the varied data requirements they may have. Our team of expert consultants can help you to identify and prioritise your key requirements from a data platform and work with you to select the most appropriate platform for you. Although we are a Microsoft solutions partner we recognise that your particular circumstances may be best suited to a non Microsoft solution and we will always offer an impartial and vendor independent view.

We implement a mentoring and collaborative style of consultancy so that we can work with you to plan for the best data platform for your business or organisation.

Whether you are looking to develop a completely new data platform solution or to migrate a legacy data platform to a modern cloud infrastructure we can offer you advice, guidance, implementation, support and training to move you to your end goal in a way that suits you.

What are you looking for help with?

• Data Platform Review?

• Data Platform Selection, Design and Implementation?

• Data Platform Migration?

Data Platform - Review

Over time data environments degrade due to rapid growth, moves to the cloud, changing business demands, to name but a few reasons.

In order to keep your data platforms and dependant data solutions operating at their optimum, and at their most cost-effective best, requires continual monitoring and reviewing. Data does not stand still, and nor should your data platform.

When a data platform is designed, specified and implemented a best estimate will have been made to ensure future scalability and keep the solution fit for purpose into a pre-defined lifetime. But things change and the best plans can fall away as businesses see rapid change to their data demands, rapid growth of new business data sets coming into the data estate, new reporting requirements and increased consumer numbers, introducing new analytics tools such as AI based tools.

All of these organic, rather than planned changes can turn a data platform that performed well, was secure and compliant, into a sprawling data estate with spiralling costs and increased risk of data compliance and security breaches.

Our Data Platform Review service will help you to audit where you are today, identify any issues or threats, and plan your journey to get back on plan. We can help you with a review of your current data platform solution and help you to identify your options to solve these challenges by tuning what you have, identifying new services within your existing platform and solution , or recommending migration to modern data platforms.

A Data Platform Review will provide your with a health report and strategic roadmap to steer your data estate back to a secure, scalable and cost-effective asset.

We will show you where you can get quick wins with immediate fixes, where minor adjustments could potentially yield big performance wins, and where more strategic shifts could overcome issues such as spiralling costs, security and compliance challenges, and lack of trust in data.

A review or data platform health check does not always need to mean a redesign or migration. Sometimes it just needs a bit of a tidy up, some tuning and maybe turning on some new features that haven't been exploited yet.

Data Platform - Designing and implementing the right one for you

A performant and reliable business intelligence solution depends on a strong, extensible and future proof data platform that caters for the whole of your data journey from collecting data, storing data, preparing data and serving data to your chosen business analytics and reporting tools.

There are many elements and considerations behind a successful and future-proof data platform solution. Our data platform consultants have a wealth of experience in architecting and implementing Azure data platform solutions, Microsoft Fabric data platform solutions, and non Microsoft data platform solutions. We can steer you in the right direction and mentor your internal team, or manage your entire data platform project for you.

The high level view of your data journey probably looks something like this:

Beneath this high level view are many permutations of platform components and infrastructure choices and we pride ourselves in keeping up to date with the latest emerging technologies. (Have you heard about Microsoft Fabric?)

The data journey raises so many questions about what you should do, how you should do it and what platform you should use:

• Where will you store your gathered data?

• How will you get it there?

• What tools will you need to cleanse and prepare your data for analysis?

• How will you turn your data into a business representation that presents the everyday language used throughout your organisation and providing a one truth version of your key performance metrics?

• What toolset will you use to deliver the final reports and dashboards that will enable you to achieve data driven decision making from the valuable insights retrieved from your integrated business data?

Microsoft Azure Data Platform

Here is an example of a complex Azure data platform that can provide a centrally administered gateway to data, providing a simple, secure and rapid access to a wide variety of data sets for different audiences, both internal and external.

This Azure data platform example will provide not just a central and standardised data hub, but will also provide:

• a consolidation of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data into a data lake

• ingestion of data into a structured data warehouse

• direct access to raw data in its native form

• a set of golden rules for managing the data lake

• a scalable solution that can be extended incrementally over time

• a platform for development in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.

The Azure platform is continually evolving and offers many features, services and tools to contribute to a robust, futureproof data platform. You can find out more about key Azure Data Platform components such as Synapse Analytics, Serverless Pools, Dedicated SQL pools, Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Lake, and some of the supporting data integration tools such as Azure Synapse Data Link for Dataverse by speaking with one of our team.

Microsoft Fabric Data Platform

Or perhaps you are ready for the move to the relatively new world of Microsoft Fabric, embracing all data related functions within one workspace and platform - data lakes, data warehouses, ELT pipeline, Artificial Intelligence (AI) functions, semantic models, dashboards.

Which Data Platform Should You Choose?

With such a choice of deployment options available to you it can be difficult to ensure that you architect the most effective, performant and future-proof solution for your business. Engaging with our data strategy consultancy services will be a great way for you to get started with assessing your needs and determining possible solutions for you, along with suitable Azure learning paths and Fabric learning paths for your team to put them in the best place to implement and support planned Azure data platform solutions.

Building a Data Platform Solution - Where do you start?

Start by contacting PTR and we can take you through your options. We can assess your requirements and put together a per day or project based consultancy proposal to get you to where you need to be. It is vital that you see an early return on investment without committing to an extremely high budget and the best way to do that is to let us work with you to break your requirements down into manageable and affordable stages.

We are a big fan of Proof of Concepts (PoC) where we will work with you to choose an initial Business intelligence requirement that can be used to test the water and gain stakeholder confidence. A POC can help you to:

• Prove a chosen data platform architecture as fit for purpose

• Educate and equip your team with the new skills they will need going forward

• Carry out sizing and capacity planning to assess the full cost and budget implications

• Provide a relatively quick set of results to demonstrate the potential Return on Investment and benefits of a strong

  Data Strategy

Following a successful PoC the full data analytics and business intelligence roadmap can be planned. By looking at the long term goals we can pull out the key business processes that need to be brought in to the data analytics solution, and in line with the data strategy can build the roadmap and timeline to start the journey.

It will be a journey, and the direction may from time to time change direction as business priorities change, but with a strong data Strategy, the right data platform and a well thought out roadmap these priority changes can easily be accommodated.

Equipping your team with the knowledge and skills they require, and building their confidence to implement a successful BI solution is key to a successful project so you may also want to consider complementing consultancy and mentoring with training.

Data Platform - Migration

We help clients migrate from legacy data platforms to modern cloud based infrastructures.

The data world is rapidly changing and there have been multiple new data platform releases over the last 5 to 10 years. We have seen the following platforms emerge and evolve from Microsoft alone:

• Power BI

• Azure

• Power Platform

• Fabric

• AI

It seems crazy to be talking of Power BI data platform (service) solutions being legacy when the enterprise versions of the Power BI platform only became mainstream less than 10 years ago, and Azure Synapse only went into general availability in 2019. But each of these have now been superseded by the single Microsoft Fabric one data ecosystem.

Technology is moving fast and our data solutions need to move with them, or be left behind in terms of functionality, governance and support.

A data platform health check and review will identify whether you are at risk through legacy platforms. Where there is good justification for considering a migration PTR are well placed to advise on the most fit for purpose options and to help you on you migration journey.

How can PTR help?

Our data platform consultants have a wealth of experience across many industry sectors and across many data platforms and have encountered most of the challenges you will be facing along your data journey. We have worked with integrating data from a wide range of systems including financial, sales, retail, supply chain, logistics, membership, project management, and across a wide variety of data platforms. We have also worked on data sets from very specialised industries and applications.

We can help you to plan for a successful business intelligence solution by working with you to design an data platform that is tailored to your current and future needs. This may include:

• Audit and review of existing Data Estate

• Assessing the suitability of a Data Warehouse and subsequent design and implementation

• Requirements for separate enterprise grade modelling platform

• Suitability of public cloud offerings

• Challenging existing data collection procedures

• Opportunities for further Data Consumers

• Data driven workflow and process automation

• Requirements for Data Lake provision

• Possibilities with regards Data Science and Machine Learning

Our Azure consultancy service can help you to get kick started with Microsoft Azure and Fabric data platforms. We can help you understand the platform and the topologies and services that are available to you to ensure you can achieve the optimum Data Platform solution and will guide you through a successful data journey with our data strategy consultancy service.

The team at PTR are here to help you no matter what stage of your BI journey you are at. If your data solutions that have been in place for some time now you may be ready for a Data Platform Review or a Power BI Health Check or be looking into migrating your Power BI estate into Microsoft Fabric.

Whatever your Data Source challenge our Data Analytics & Azure Consultancy team are here to help you. Call our consultancy team on 0118 979 4000 or email them for further information.