Letting one’s data captive provides competitors with an extra edge. Take control of your data with BYOD and unleash its true potential.
Almost 55 per cent of the respondents in a Deloitte study reported that analytics has significantly or fairly improved the organisation’s competitive position.
Data forms the bedrock of gaining these analytics.
In 2016, Microsoft released a process known as BYOD (Bring Your Own Database) to assist customers in extracting data from their D365 F&O environment.
D365 F&O (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations) is a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system delivered via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Therefore, getting data from the “back-end database” is simply not possible.
Companies do have data in D365 running in the cloud, but they still have other on-premise or somewhere else to run. These situations demand the need to get data from D365 into another environment so other applications can use it; hence, BYOD. The most common use of BYOD includes data analysis and long-running reporting.
Deep dive into the process
One of the best solutions suggests employing the most basic data structures when planning and constructing a standard data warehousing and analytics environment. This will eventually help build the necessary transformations and logic to meet the business objectives. From a practical standpoint, this means one should develop the logic from the raw table structures rather than a collection of views.
For most customers, the availability of data and analytical solutions remains crucial.
To that end, one of the many capabilities available in D365 F&O is bringing your own database. With BYOD, it is easy to transfer data from the AxDB transitional database to an external one, such as an Azure SQL database housed in the same or a different tenant.
BYOD pushes data to external databases that may be used with External Data Warehouses for PowerBI reporting, Dataverse, etc., using pre-existing data entities already available in ERP. As a result, businesses will have complete control over their data and make storage decisions. This will also reduce the need to build ETL (Extract, Transform Load) pipelines.
Breather for startups
In IT buying, terms like “high switching cost” or “vendor lock-in” are heard commonly. It is a situation where a customer using one vendor’s product or service cannot easily transition to a competitor’s. Historically, businesses have believed that keeping a company’s data captive in their databases makes it more difficult for them to leave for a rival. Sadly, it has turned out to be the case.
However, the advancement in data engineering tools has challenged this status quo, opening up a brand-new market for products that add value by enabling companies to perform and automate actions on top of data rather than holding it captive. This is where startups can build their own BYOD applications that come with certain benefits:
Less dependency: Companies can separate the product from the underlying data, thereby reducing the lock-in to a particular vendor. This will make it simpler for even small businesses to switch from one tool to another if they don’t think it suits their requirements.
Reduced compliance overhead: Due to compliance and security constraints, transmitting data to third parties can be extremely difficult or even impossible for some large enterprises. This kind of architecture might lessen that strain, which would facilitate the startup’s sales cycles.
Better usage alignment: By eliminating the expense of data hosting, a certain startup’s pricing model may concentrate on the value they provide to the customers. With cost cutdowns, it is easier for companies to retain their customers with discounts in periods of lower usage or some other innovative offers.
Cons
The typical ERP development lifecycle is a methodical, slow procedure that ensures the system’s reliability and resilience. Hence, changing the data environment can be a laborious process that takes a long time, which hinders the ability of the data and analytics teams to provide the business with updates and changes.
The BYOD approach can therefore slow down the data and analytics team’s ability to respond quickly, improve the system, and carry out any further development of the downstream semantic models, data warehouse, and reports. This is because the dependency on code promotion in the ERP development lifecycle can cause any new fields to take weeks or longer to be accessible.
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