Microsoft Cloud can be considered one of the major cloud services there is. Offering many services and solutions for enterprises around the world to work more efficiently and securely. 

And when it comes to data migration and transformation, Microsoft is leading the way with tools such as Azure Data Factory, harnessing the power of the cloud to make dealing with data and security issues related to it feel like a breeze. 

So, what is Azure Data Factory, and how it can benefit your business?

What is Azure Data Factory?

Microsoft Azure Data factory is Azure's cloud ETL service for scale-out serverless data integration and data transformation. It enables organizations of any size and in every industry to use it for a variety of purposes, such as:

• Data Engineering
• Migrating on-premise SSIS packages to Azure
• Operational data integration
• Analytics
• Ingesting data into data warehouses and more

Suppose you are working with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages for on-premise data integration. In that case, these packages can run in the Azure Data factory including custom SSIS components, enabling any developer to use ADF for any data migration needs.

What does Azure Data Factory do?

To be more specific, ADF allows you to do the following:

• Copy data from many supported sources both on-premise and cloud sources
• Transform the data 
• Publish the copied and transformed data, sending it to a destination data storage or analytics engine
• Monitor the data flow using a rich graphical interface

How would your business benefit from Azure Data Factory?

If you have a cloud project, then this is the solution for you!

When you need to perform data movement activities across various networks whether on-premise or cloud, then Azure Data factory is the solution to help you move and transform your data seamlessly without having to overwhelm the IT team with meaningless workloads. 

Data Factory is particularly a required enabler for enterprises who are just moving to the cloud, and who thus try to connect on-premise data with the Cloud.

For this Azure Data Factory has an Integration Runtime engine, a Gateway service which can be installed on-premise, in turn guaranteeing a secure transfer of data from and to the cloud.

Working with Azure Data Factory

The best thing about ADF is that it's a user interface tool which offers a graphical overview to create and manage activities and pipelines. You won't need any coding skills, however, complex transformations will require ADF experience. 

Here are the important features that you could work with:

1. ADF has default connectors with on-premise data resources such as MYSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle Data Bases.
2. It also supports branching, which means the output of one action can be a trigger for another to start.
3. ADF supports a tumbling window trigger which is relevant to creating partitioned data such as Data Lake set-up. In addition to that, it also supports event triggers as well, like a new Blob on Blob Storage should automatically trigger a transformation.
4. Provides monitoring and alerting.
5. Allows running pipelines up to 1 per minute. However, it doesn't allow real-time but enables close to real-time.
6. ADF works well with Databricks to schedule ML algorithms.

How Ctelecoms can help

Our team keeps on working to gain advanced specializations from Microsoft, therefore, we are capable of working with your enterprise to take full advantage of the Azure platform and Data Factory as well. 

So, if you're thinking of deploying this solution, just contact our team and we'll be happy to provide the help and consultation: https://www.ctelecoms.com.sa/en/Form15/Contact-Us