Azure provides infrastructure and services to ingest billions of transactions using hyper-scale processing. It provides petabytes of storage for data, and it provides a host of interconnected services that can pass data among themselves. With such capabilities in place, data can be processed to generate meaningful knowledge and insights. There are multiple types of insights that can be generated through data analysis, which are as follows:

• Descriptive: This type of analysis provides details about what is happening or has happened in the past.
• Predictive: This type of analysis provides details about what is going to happen in the future.
• Prescriptive: This type of analysis provides details about what should be done to either enhance or prevent current or future events.
• Cognitive: This type of analysis actually executes actions that are determined by prescriptive analytics in an automated manner.

While deriving insights from data is good, it is equally important to act on them. Azure provides a rich platform to ingest large volumes of data, process and transform it, store and generate insights from it, and display it on real-time dashboards. It is also possible to take action on these insights automatically. These services are available to every customer of Azure and they provide a rich ecosystem in which customers can create solutions. Enterprises are creating numerous applications and services that are completely disrupting industries because of the easy availability of these intelligent services from Azure, which are combined to create meaningful value for end customers. Azure ensures that services that are commercially not viable to implement for small and medium companies can now be readily consumed and deployed in a few minutes.