29 Jul

Reimagining an Energy Enterprise to Mitigate Reporting Fines by Leveraging Azure’s Data Governance Solutions

TJ
Tom Jenkin

The energy sector is navigating a dynamic period. As organisations around the world drive towards net zero, one energy enterprise is embracing data-driven decision-making. This shift represents a fundamental transformation, with data governance at its core.

A Myriad of Challenges, Risking Hefty Fines

Our client needed to make better use of its internal data to overcome a number of challenges. These were:

  • Operational inefficiencies, rising costs and growing variances.
  • Data integrity, accessibility, and governance issues put them at risk of huge fines from regulators.
  • The reporting element, emissions and carbon footprint reduction, is a human-intensive activity with the potential for reporting errors - risking increased fines.
  • Enhanced internal capabilities, infrastructure and operating model were needed to optimise and govern their data landscape. 

Federated Data Governance, Powered by Microsoft Azure

At the heart of our approach was following a data mesh approach, which separates responsibility between functional data domains that focus on creating data products and a platform team that focuses on technical capabilities.  

By leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure cloud, we democratised data governance across the organisation by moving to a federated, product-based operating model. Microsoft Purview’s data governance solutions create one place to manage on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS data. 

Using Microsoft Purview, the organisation was able to integrate critical data sources and data governance, providing a self-service tool for data sharing.

Following the Microsoft cloud-scale analytics framework the two critical parts of building the data mesh are:

  • Data management landing zone: The foundation of your data architecture. It contains all critical capabilities for data management, like data catalog, data lineage, API catalog, master data management.
  • Data landing zones: Subscriptions that host your analytics and AI solutions. They include key capabilities for hosting an analytics platform.

 

The data platform was built using Microsoft cloud-native PaaS solutions encompassing:

  • Azure Data Factory - Creating data-driven workflows for orchestrating data movement and transforming data at scale. 
  • Azure Function - Python serverless application running the data transformation
  • Azure Storage ADLS Gen2 - Data lake storage for structured and unstructured data.
  • Microsoft Purview - Creating an up-to-date map of the organisations' data landscape. 

The core platform enabled a report on CO2e emissions via Microsoft PowerBI, allowing the business to access and track carbon emissions across its various operations and assets.

The build-out of the data platform gave autonomy to the data product owner, and increased trust in the quality and accuracy of the data through the data contract.

The implementation of Microsoft Purview helped our energy client to democratise data governance across the organisation. This lightened the load for the data owners, administrators and users, providing users with more autonomy. This provides a pathway to the Microsoft Fabric unified data analytics platform, enabling the client to unlock the full potential of their data in the AI era.

Find out how we're accelerating net zero and saving millions for this global energy & utilities enterprise

A Modern Approach to Provide Autonomy

The organisation’s adoption of Microsoft Azure cloud-based technology boosted performance and helped them to be more data-driven. 

Moving to a data mesh architecture allowed the organisation shift from centralised to federated ownership, backed up by a modern self-service data platform. This framework allowed the organisation to govern the architecture by ring-fencing it with the data management services while also providing autonomy to data owners. 

The data was then made available via Microsoft Purview for the rest of the organisation to consume, whereas before this was a manual process with multiple versions of the data with no single source of truth defined.

This transformation has short and long-term benefits. In the here and now, access to accurate data means reporting to regulators carries less risk, saving the company millions in fines.  In the long-term, this adoption enables billions of dollars in savings through cutting long-term operational costs and streamlining the business.

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