Introduction

Big Data such as social media posts and high-speed streaming credit card transactions often contain unprocessed information that can help organizations respond to customer needs in real time, improve efficiency of business processes, and expose trends and insights to help with decision making. Microsoft’s Big Data landscape includes products and services that capture high-speed data, provide scalable petabyte-level data storage, and deliver sophisticated analytic and machine learning capabilities. The Azure-based Big Data services provide quicker deployment and scalability with less upfront investment than on-premises products, which could enable new kinds of Big Data solutions. Hybrid configurations deliver options for separating workloads to protect critical data on-premises. However, most offerings require specialized skills, and constructing a complete architecture can be complex.

The actual features and capabilities of the products and services continue to change; consequently, this report takes a snapshot as of late 2016. (For a visualization of the landscape, see the illustration “Visualizing Microsoft’s Big Data Landscape“.)