A demanding business-intelligence workload moves to Azure, pairing a scalable SQL data warehouse with Qlik Sense to load real-time data in under 50 milliseconds.
The challenge
Qlik Sense is a business-intelligence and visual-analytics platform supporting everything from centrally deployed dashboards to self-service visualisation. Aspen required Qlik Sense to integrate with a SQL data warehouse that was highly reliable, scalable and fully customisable.
At the same time, Aspen needed to significantly reduce CAPEX and OPEX, and wanted a service that could be looked after by a cloud services provider. Not all stakeholders were initially comfortable with putting their data warehouse in Azure, security was a key concern.
The solution
BUI followed a structured approach: assessing the current environment so that all stakeholder concerns and functional and performance criteria were catered for; designing a robust, scalable and cost-effective target architecture; and implementing it securely and efficiently. The design delivered:
- Compute power tuned for memory-intensive applications such as Qlik Sense.
- Scalable technology that let Aspen choose an infrastructure design within budget and aligned to performance needs.
- A highly secure environment protected with a Fortigate firewall acquired from the Azure marketplace.
- Reduced administrative overhead by removing the need to maintain on-premises hardware.
The results
Aspen achieved latency of below 50ms for Qlik Sense real-time data loads. Just as importantly, the project showcased Azure's performance, elasticity and security first-hand, winning over the stakeholders who had been hesitant about moving their data warehouse to the cloud.