Government data scientists spend inordinate amounts of time each day manually scrubbing terabytes of operational data for advanced analytics and business intelligence. Well, now they can be glad that Microsoft has unveiled its new data analytics and visualization offerings, called HDInsight and Power BI, as part of the Azure Government cloud platform.
AIS Network is pleased to partner with Microsoft to deliver Microsoft Azure on Microsoft U.S. Government Cloud with free and fluid access to streaming Power BI-ready data, context and insights to build Innovative eGov solutions.
Microsoft said in a March 6 blog post published that the services will work to help government users manage, analyze and visualize big data in the Azure cloud environment.
According to Microsoft Azure General Manager Tom Keane, author of the post, “To further our commitment to providing the latest in cloud innovation for government customers we’re excited to announce the general availability of HDInsight and Power BI Pro in Microsoft Cloud for Government.
“HDInsight and Power BI bring exciting new capabilities to Azure Government that enable organizations to manage, analyze, and visualize large quantities of data. HDInsight unlocks the ability to build data and machine learning applications that run-on Apache Spark and Hadoop. Power BI allows for the aggregation of data and visualization with easy to operate dashboard functionality.
“We are also announcing a preview of Cognitive Services in Azure Government. We have enabled scenarios such as audio and text translation into other languages as well as facial (gender and age) and emotion recognition with Computer Vision and Emotion.”
So what does this mean? With these capabilities working today, we can take data and derive insight in minutes.
Here’s a video example of these capabilities working together. It demonstrates how easy it is to build a data-centric solution on Azure Government to implement a Government-focused scenario. In this demo, Microsoft leveraged HDInsight, Power BI and Machine Learning along with Cognitive Services (available in preview for Azure Government) to reveal how you can easily build a solution to translate and analyze text and visualize the results. In Microsoft’s scenario, they translate a Chinese document to English and then perform data analytics and visualizations on that translation, showing:
- Cognitive Services to translate a Chinese document to English.
- HDInsight to perform data analytics on that translation and produce basic word counts.
- Power BI to visualize the data produced by HDInsight.
As Keane pointed out, some partners are leveraging these capabilities to provide real-time dashboards for their solutions. Here’s his overview of HDInsight and PowerBI:
Azure HDInsight
HDInsight is the only fully-managed cloud Hadoop offering that provides optimized open source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R Server backed by a 99.9% SLA. Each of these big data technologies and ISV applications are easily deployable as managed clusters with enterprise-level security and monitoring.
HDInsight brings Big Data to Azure Government and broadens the landscape for building powerful data analysis solutions. Examples include:
- Deploy a Big Data analysis cluster in minutes. No upfront costs, get started immediately.
- Enable streaming and processing of large data sets in real time using Kafka, Storm, and Spark for HDInsight.
- Build Machine Learning capabilities with Spark and R Server
- Build intelligent applications that leverage big data to deliver personalized experiences
If you want to get started creating powerful solutions with HDInsight for Azure Government, let us know now.
Power BI Pro for U.S. Government
Power BI brings your Big Data solutions to life with live dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling visualizations.
Power BI connects to a broad range of data wherever it lives and enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding.
Power BI Pro for Microsoft Cloud for Government includes:
- Power BI service is a cloud-based business analytics service that gives you a single view of your most critical data.
- Power BI Desktop puts visual analytics at your fingertips with intuitive report authoring; drag-and-drop to place content exactly where you want it on the flexible and fluid canvas, and quickly discover patterns as you explore a single unified view of linked, interactive visualizations.
- Power BI Mobil helps you stay connected to your data from anywhere, anytime; and get a 360° view of your organization’s data on the go — at the touch of your fingertips.
Want to get started? Contact us to sign up!
Laurie Head is Co-Owner and VP Mar/Comm for AISN.