Options for a Centralized Data Strategy in the Microsoft Ecosystem

Teams Meeting: TBD

Meeting Sponsor: CGI

The talk lately has been heavily about Microsoft Fabric when discussing data management and for good reason. It's an end to end platform that includes everything you need to centrally manage data including multiple storage choices, multiple data ingestion methods, high integration with semantic models and Power BI, built in ability to build AI driven processes, and built in data science capabilities including building predictive machine learning models. Even though Fabric has an easy to understand cost model and is very cost effective when compared to its closest competitors, the price may not be right for all organizations, at least not at the beginning of a data strategy journey. This presentation will walk through Fabric and its major components to set the table, but will then present other options for managing your data in the Microsoft ecosystem whether in Azure or on premises. Including a hybrid approach using Fabric for part of the architecture.

Speaker: Todd Painter
Todd Painter has been working in Data & AI for 25 years working for multiple companies in the St. Louis area, doing data consultancy in the legal industry for a few years, and now working as a technical specialist at Microsoft. At Microsoft he works with the largest healthcare organizations in the US on their Data & AI efforts including data platforms in Fabric/Databricks, building AI systems leveraging Microsoft's Azure AI services, migrating SQL Server and other databases to Azure, and helping to improve operations via the use of Azure ARC and the Azure suite of management tools to centralize management of on premises servers.