Aspen Holdings Turns To Microsoft And BUI To Transform SQL And Qlik Sense In Azure

Achieving latency of below 50ms for Qlik Sense real time data to load

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Project

Azure Network Watcher, Azure Backup for instances, Azure Backup for SQL Server, Azure Batch

Customer

Aspen Holdings

Year

2019

What We Did

Azure Migration – Performance, elasticity and Security

Business Challenge

Headquartered in Durban, South Africa, Aspen is a leading global specialty and branded multinational pharmaceutical company in both emerging and developed markets. Key to Aspen is their SQL Datawarehouse and Qlik Sense solution which holds all analytical data.

Qlik Sense is a business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics platform that supports a range of use cases, including centrally deployed guided analytics apps and dashboards, custom and embedded analytics and self service visualization Aspen required Qlik Sense to integrate with a SQL Datawarehouse that was highly reliable, scalable in nature and fully customizable.

In addition, Aspen needed to significantly reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs and looked for a service that could be looked after by cloud services provider.

Project Outcome

Aspen achieved latency of below 50ms for Qlik Sense real time data to load

Assessment
Assess current environments ensuring all stakeholder concerns, functional and performance criteria are catered for in a new target architecture.

Future Proof
Design and Plan for a target architecture that is robust, scalable and cost effective in the long run.

New Architecture
Implement target architecture in a structured approach that is secure and efficient.

New Solution
Implementation of a managed backup solution to contend with diverse technologies and distributed data.

Using Microsoft Technologies Aspen was able to

Reduced CAPEX and OPEX achieved by the use of Azure components and the acquisition of a managed cloud SLA with BUI.
Compute power designed for memory intensive applications such as Qlik Sense.
Scalable technology that allows Aspen to choose an infrastructure design within budget and aligned to functionality and performance.
A highly secure environment protected with a Fortigate firewall acquired from the Azure marketplace.
Reduced admin overhead with regards to maintaining hardware on-premise.

Looking to the Future

Not all stakeholders were initially keen of having their data warehouse in Azure specifically around security concerns. In this story we were able to showcase the features of Azure specifically around performance, elasticity and security. In addition, BUI received feedback that the running of Qlik Sense modules in Azure is much quicker now.