Grundfos creates innovative solutions to the planet’s water and climate challenges. As its data volume grew due to Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, the pump manufacturer needed better discoverability and governance across its cloud-based and on-premises data sources. Grundfos explored a new data governance service, Microsoft Azure Purview, in private preview and plans to use it together with Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, Azure Data Lake Storage, and SQL Server. By combining these solutions, Grundfos will be able to increase automation, reduce manual data entry, improve compliance, and empower employees to gain insights from all the data, make better decisions, and identify new opportunities for the company’s customers.
“With Azure Purview, we’ll accelerate our ability to track and interpret a wide range of data, which we’ll use to create solutions at scale that truly help improve the environment and people’s lives.”
Thomas Asger Hansen, Senior Manager, Enterprise Data and AI, Grundfos
Data for sustainable water solutions
Grundfos manufactures pumps that provide critical services like heating, cooling, and clean water to people around the world. Founded in 1945 in Denmark, the company produces more than 16 million pump units a year. Its mission is to pioneer solutions to the world’s water and climate challenges and improve quality of life for people. In 2015, Grundfos won the esteemed United Nations Momentum for Change Lighthouse Activity Award for its LIFELINK water solution, which provides reliable water supplies in Kenya and Uganda.
Over time, Grundfos’s business became more than just manufacturing high-quality pumps. The company set out to use Internet of Things (IoT) data collection and data analysis to add value to customers through comprehensive solutions. As part of that digital transformation, Grundfos had to rethink how it interacted with its petabytes of growing data. The company’s data was hard to track and manage across its hybrid environment, which included data from pump IoT sensors, software as a service (SaaS) sources, and on-premises sources.
To find data, Grundfos employees had to know that it existed in the first place, then identify the right colleague and send an email or knock on their office door to ask for the information. Employees couldn’t extract the full value of the data because the cataloging wasn’t fully automated and didn’t offer an analytics component. Data stewards had to curate data manually, which was time-consuming and cumbersome.
Innovative roadmap and early adoption
Grundfos needed automated data scanning and search capabilities across its cloud and on-premises data sources. It also wanted to better analyze its data to inform strategic business decisions and new solution development. A thought leader in its industry, Grundfos began working closely with Microsoft to help develop a roadmap for implementing a new Microsoft Azure–based data solution in private preview. With its roadmap in place, Grundfos will adopt Azure Purview, a unified data governance service, to drive fast and efficient discovery of qualitative data and reshape the company’s data culture.
“We had weekly conversations with the Microsoft product teams and saw that the Azure Purview team’s vision aligned with ours—not only for the development of our digital solutions, but also ideas about long-term governance success,” says Thomas Asger Hansen, Senior Manager, Enterprise Data and AI at Grundfos. “This was the strongest data governance option that we found.”
Adds Søren Schade Ejlersen, Lead Architect, Business Intelligence at Grundfos, “Microsoft has been very supportive of our requirements in terms of features in Azure Purview, and we’ve been impressed at how rapidly it evolved into what it is now.”
Grundfos will take advantage of Azure Purview Data Map to help the company automatically scan and classify data from across its hybrid data estate. Grundfos will also use Azure Purview Data Catalog to update its existing catalog capabilities, improving search, lineage, and business glossaries. To add flexible and highly scalable analytics capabilities to its integrated landscape, the company will incorporate its existing Azure Synapse Analytics deployment. Grundfos already uses Microsoft Power BI, which tightly interoperates with Azure Purview on scanning, classification, search, and lineage. “I think Azure Purview will help us make Power BI even more useful to more employees,” says Thomas Asger Hansen.
Microsoft designed Azure Purview for data producers and consumers, such as data engineers, business analysts, and tech analysts, in addition to the data officers who are responsible for risk and compliance. At Grundfos, data scientists and information analysts will rely on Azure Purview and so will a wider range of employees, from executive leadership to factory floor workers who need to check machine data.
Increased automation, improved efficiency
Using Azure Purview, Grundfos will bring together data from many hybrid sources, including its on-premises Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA environments and cloud-based sources like websites, pump sensor and other IoT data, and Azure Data Lake Storage. “Not only can we finally bring together all of our data in Azure Purview, but we can connect the digital dots,” says Mikkel Brynildsen, Chief Data Scientist, Enterprise Data and AI at Grundfos. “We have to use the right metadata and describe data correctly in order to get good data—and using Azure Purview will help us do that faster and more easily than we do today.”
Grundfos plans to classify around 70 percent of the data from its Azure data estate and a little less for its on-premises systems and SAP data estate. To classify data correctly, the data stewards will perform the data mapping and define custom classification rules. And after automating its classification process through Azure Purview Data Map, the company will reduce cumbersome manual tasks and increase employee productivity. “We’re finding Azure Purview easier to use and more streamlined than our legacy data catalog,” says Mark Karmar, Senior Big Data Engineer at Grundfos. “We’ll be able to push data into the catalog faster, which will help us run more data-driven projects.”
The time that employees spent on manual tasks can instead go toward defining data models, standardizing classifications, reviewing analytics, and boosting engineering efforts. “Adopting Azure Purview helps us free up time for our resources to be used for more purposeful, proactive work,” says Thomas Asger Hansen. “We’ll do things with Azure Purview that would be incredibly difficult to do otherwise. It would take probably five times as many resources to achieve what we plan to accomplish with Azure Purview.”
Minimized compliance risk
Grundfos has a small, dedicated team that manages compliance in coordination with its legal team. These data officers handle General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements and the company’s risk reporting and escalation process. Through the data use governance capabilities in Azure Purview, these data officers have insights and policies to help them better monitor complex GDPR policies and meet requirements.
To further enhance their compliance acumen, Grundfos compliance team analysts can use Azure Purview to review scans of data stores that might reveal hidden information, such as personally identifiable information. “I had a ‘Wow’ moment when I realized that we now have the possibility of finding information that we couldn’t find before,” says Søren Schade Ejlersen. “We can use that insight from Azure Purview to minimize our risk of compliance fines.”
Using Azure Purview to classify data carefully in its data catalog will give Grundfos a quick, accurate way to identify any data that’s governed by GDPR. “Data compliance starts with defining data correctly and knowing precisely what data you have,” says Henrik Lykke Jespersen, Lead Security Architect at Grundfos. “Thanks to Azure Purview, we’ll be able to significantly reduce effort, save time, and streamline our compliance process.”
Adds Mark Karmar, “We can use predefined rules for how to handle GDPR data, which means data scientists and data engineers can worry less about the compliance issues and focus more on what we do with the data.”
Creating new business value
By blending Azure Purview with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI, Grundfos can gain a holistic understanding of its data and maximize that data’s business value. With this combination of better data discoverability, analysis, and visualization, the company can make better decisions. “It will be a resounding success when employees start their data journey themselves with Azure Purview instead of knocking on someone’s door,” says Signe Thomsen, Data Specialist, Enterprise Data and AI at Grundfos. ”We’ll position ourselves to find new business opportunities because we’ll surface data that was difficult to find previously.”
Integrating hybrid data sources, reducing manual tasks, automating scanning and classification, and simplifying compliance means that Grundfos employees can put their efforts toward achieving the company’s mission. Concludes Thomas Asger Hansen, “With Azure Purview, we’ll accelerate our ability to track and interpret a wide range of data, which we’ll use to create solutions at scale that truly help improve the environment and people’s lives.”
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“We can use predefined rules for how to handle GDPR data, which means data scientists and data engineers can worry less about the compliance issues and focus more on what we do with the data.”
Mark Karmar, Senior Big Data Engineer, Grundfos
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