Azure provides infrastructure and services to ingest millions and billions of transactions with hyper-scale processing. It provides multi-petabytes of storage for data. It provides a host of inter-connected services that can pass data between 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 kind of analysis provides details about what is happening or has happened in the past.
• Predictive: This kind of analysis provides details about what is going to happen in the near-future or the future.

• Prescriptive: This kind of analysis provides details about what should be done to either enhance or prevent the current or future events happening.
• Cognitive: This actually executes the actions 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 volume of data, process and transform it, eventually store and generate insights from them, and display them on real-time dashboards. It is also possible to take action on the insights automatically. These services are available to every user of Azure and provide a rich ecosystem on which to create solutions. Enterprises are creating applications and services that are completely disrupting industries because of the easy availability of these intelligent services from Azure that are easily combined to create meaningful value to end customers. Azure ensures that services that are commercially unviable to implement by small and medium companies can now be readily consumed and deployed in a few minutes.