Business use case discovery for Azure Data Lake & D365 Customer Insights

When a Customer ask I have Azure Data lake, do I need Customer Insights?  how both works as complementary or as a elementary version together in Customer 's eco-space solving for higher impact.

D365 Customer Insights is one of most growing low code Analytics Product offering from Microsoft.

in this article , trying to explain how azure data lake and d365 customer insights can work hand in hand to solve business use cases. there are different pros and cons and also uses case for both to work together. Business use case discovery is pretty important for partners to identify which feature would help customers the most.

Customer insights by default provides a CI lake(Internal lake) which is free with unlimited capacity of data storage for  *1 lac unified profile data in the base license. when u connect multiple hybrid data sources to CI, they are actually copied to CI when you choose data source options (first option) and inclemently data is getting loaded to CI lake. Yes its highly secure/encoded space & Data security is still managed by Azure infrastructure behind the scene without any extra expenses to azure.

*this value is further aggregated on top up applied based on requirement of volume of expected unified profile for customer.

1. Existing Data Lake for full data storage and concurrent update(BYOSA)

 If customer has its own existing data lake, they can use same data lake and product provides option to use their own lake while creating the environment in CI. but in this option they miss opportunity to use free data lake provided by CI in default. This kind of explicit case is most popular for banking or on-prem customers who want to use their own data  store and want to keep full access with them for any further operational/analytical purposes. all transactional responses and KPI's can be written back to same customer lake without saving to any other place hence example -

  a)BFSI customer looking forward to keep full access to its data in their own managed data lake 

  b)some customer already have full data store completely on data lake already don't want to copy data to CI lake and ok to continue to pay their  own  lake space.

    c) full access to data and more integration capability.

this is called as BYOSA(Bring your own storage account) approach

  

         in above approach, drawback/missing feature could be -

          a) missing free CI data lake space

          b)extra cost of data lake on azure to pay

 

     2.Data lake as "one of its Data source" in CI to bring unstructured/partial data

Data lake can also be one of data source while adding multiple hybrid data sources from various connector option.
as we know  data lake connector is by default available on Customer Insights and adding any data from data lake to customer insights is simple as just inserting authentication password/creds to import data from lake space.

 

         popular use case for above approach could be-

a)some unstructured customer data needed to be imported- for example  call recording & its sentiment analysis. that data can be brought to CI after transformation applied on lake. 
b)some data (part of Organization data) resides on data lake, it can be structured also, and requirement is to get data from data lake and other sources altogether and unify it on CI lake altogether.

 

above is most simple/popular use case and done for many use case, further to above data can also b exported back to CI with export destination which is again low code feature of CI, explained in more details below. 

 3.Export Unified data(condensed) only to paid space of Azure Data Lake

Even if Azure data lake is not used so far in implementation, one option can be to en-route the exported unified profile or some key segmentation/KPI to it.

Basically Export destination option in Customer Insights, way to setup is only enter respective path and credentials.