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A danish manufacturing company creates innovative solutions to the planet’s water and climate challenges. As its data volume grew due to Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, the pump manufacturer needed better discoverability and governance across its cloud-based and on-premises data sources. The company explored a new data governance service, Microsoft Azure Purview, in private preview and plans to use it together with Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, Azure Data Lake Storage, and SQL Server. By combining these solutions, The company will be able to increase automation, reduce manual data entry, improve compliance, and empower employees to gain insights from all the data, make better decisions, and identify new opportunities for the company’s customers.

“With Azure Purview, we’ll accelerate our ability to track and interpret a wide range of data, which we’ll use to create solutions at scale that truly help improve the environment and people’s lives.”

Senior Manager, Enterprise Data and AI

Data for sustainable water solutions

The company manufactures pumps that provide critical services like heating, cooling, and clean water to people around the world. Founded in 1945, they produce more than 16 million pump units a year. Its mission is to pioneer solutions to the world’s water and climate challenges and improve quality of life for people.

Over time, their business became more than just manufacturing high-quality pumps. The company set out to use Internet of Things (IoT) data collection and data analysis to add value to customers through comprehensive solutions. As part of that digital transformation, they had to rethink how it interacted with its petabytes of growing data. The company’s data was hard to track and manage across its hybrid environment, which included data from pump IoT sensors, software as a service (SaaS) sources, and on-premises sources.

To find data, the company’s employees had to know that it existed in the first place, then identify the right colleague and send an email or knock on their office door to ask for the information. Employees couldn’t extract the full value of the data because the cataloging wasn’t fully automated and didn’t offer an analytics component. Data stewards had to curate data manually, which was time-consuming and cumbersome. 

Innovative roadmap and early adoption

The company needed automated data scanning and search capabilities across its cloud and on-premises data sources. It also wanted to better analyse its data to inform strategic business decisions and new solution development. A thought leader in its industry, they began working closely with Intelance and Microsoft to help develop a roadmap for implementing a new Microsoft Azure based data solution in private preview. With its roadmap in place, they will adopt Azure Purview, a unified data governance service, to drive fast and efficient discovery of qualitative data and reshape the company’s data culture.

The company will take advantage of Azure Purview Data Map to help the company automatically scan and classify data from across its hybrid data estate. They will also use Azure Purview Data Catalog to update its existing catalog capabilities, improving search, lineage, and business glossaries. To add flexible and highly scalable analytics capabilities to its integrated landscape, they will incorporate their existing Azure Synapse Analytics deployment. The company already uses Microsoft Power BI, which tightly interoperates with Azure Purview on scanning, classification, search, and lineage.

Increased automation, improved efficiency

Using Azure Purview, the company will bring together data from many hybrid sources, including its on-premises Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA environments and cloud-based sources like websites, pump sensor and other IoT data, and Azure Data Lake Storage. Not only can we finally bring together all of our data in Azure Purview, but we can connect the digital dots, Chief Data Scientist, Enterprise Data and AI. We have to use the right metadata and describe data correctly in order to get good data and using Azure Purview will help us do that faster and more easily than we do today.

The company plans to classify around 70 percent of the data from its Azure data estate and a little less for its on-premises systems and SAP data estate. To classify data correctly, the data stewards will perform the data mapping and define custom classification rules. And after automating its classification process through Azure Purview Data Map, the company will reduce cumbersome manual tasks and increase employee productivity. We’re finding Azure Purview easier to use and more streamlined than our legacy data catalog, Senior Big Data Engineer. We’ll be able to push data into the catalog faster, which will help us run more data-driven projects.

The time that employees spent on manual tasks can instead go toward defining data models, standardizing classifications, reviewing analytics, and boosting engineering efforts. Adopting Azure Purview helps us free up time for our resources to be used for more purposeful, proactive work. We’ll do things with Azure Purview that would be incredibly difficult to do otherwise. It would take probably five times as many resources to achieve what we plan to accomplish with Azure Purview.

Minimised compliance risk

The company has a small, dedicated team that manages compliance in coordination with its legal team. These data officers handle General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements and the company’s risk reporting and escalation process. Through the data use governance capabilities in Azure Purview, these data officers have insights and policies to help them better monitor complex GDPR policies and meet requirements. 

To further enhance their compliance acumen, The company’s compliance team analysts can use Azure Purview to review scans of data stores that might reveal hidden information, such as personally identifiable information.

Using Azure Purview to classify data carefully in its data catalog will give Grundfos a quick, accurate way to identify any data that’s governed by GDPR. Data compliance starts with defining data correctly and knowing precisely what data you have. We can use predefined rules for how to handle GDPR data, which means data scientists and data engineers can worry less about the compliance issues and focus more on what we do with the data.

Creating new business value

By blending Azure Purview with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI, The company can gain a holistic understanding of its data and maximise that data’s business value. With this combination of better data discoverability, analysis, and visualisation, the company can make better decisions. It will be a resounding success when employees start their data journey themselves with Azure Purview instead of knocking on someone’s door, Data Specialist, Enterprise Data and AI. We’ll position ourselves to find new business opportunities because we’ll surface data that was difficult to find previously.

Integrating hybrid data sources, reducing manual tasks, automating scanning and classification, and simplifying compliance means that employees can put their efforts toward achieving the company’s mission. With Azure Purview, we’ll accelerate our ability to track and interpret a wide range of data, which we’ll use to create solutions at scale that truly help improve the environment and people’s lives.