In an increasingly data-driven world, your business must adapt. Perhaps one of the most valuable commodities in the modern era, data is an ever-moving entity, continually being sourced, pooled and leveraged by organisations all over the world.
Have you ever innocently Googled something like "beer hat", only to be bombarded with ads for that exact product? This is an example of extracting your data. Once that data is acquired, organisations use it to draw your attention.
Your business needs to leverage the technology at your disposal to ensure that you're effectively using this data to help facilitate growth, boost margins and improve your offerings. Data is powerful, but when combined with Microsoft Power BI, you can achieve so much more.
What Is Power BI?
Effectively, Power BI enables organisations to generate and share data-driven insights, which can shape decisions based on areas to strengthen, where you can optimise sections of your business and, according to your data, how this should be prioritised.
When your organisation uses Power BI, you benefit from its scalability and enterprise-level business intelligence from one unified platform. In addition, you can connect and visualise data from your entire business with integrations for other business-related applications.
Let’s talk about some of the key benefits of using Power BI.
What are the key benefits of Power BI for your business?
Ensure your business decisions are data-driven
Using Power BI’s analysis and visualisation features, you can view your data to assess where your business currently lies and track this against where it is you’re aiming to go. Power BI’s user-friendly interface is easy to navigate, allowing your organisation to generate accurate insights. This means you can see where your business is performing well and where there may be areas you need to improve, all of which are driven and supported by data.
Keep your data up to date
The effectiveness of your data hinges on its relevance. If your data is not updated regularly, you may be making important decisions around your business based on inaccurate information. With Power BI, your data is updated daily or even hourly, depending on your preferences. This ensures that any data-driven business decisions you make are done using the most up-to-date, relevant data available.
Accessibility and shareability
One of the key business benefits of Power BI is its accessibility. You can access Power BI from any device, anywhere, which is especially important given the recent shift to the hybrid working model. Your business can also freely share your insights and analysis across the organisation, granting you one single pane of glass from which to access your reports, insights and business analytics.
Power BI licencing
Power BI has three kinds of per-user licenses: free, Pro and Premium Per User. Power BI Free is designed for personal use, as it is completely free to use but doesn’t offer a direct query option, only includes one refresh per day and doesn’t give you the capabilities to share reports. Power BI Pro is more advanced, allowing you to share and collaborate with all the end-users covered by your organisation’s Power BI license and publish reports to the Power BI Service. Power BI Premium allocates a dedicated capacity to your business. You get a dedicated instance for storage instead of having to pool in the Cloud with other users.
What’s the difference between Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium?
A Power BI Pro license offers you a maximum dataset size of 1GB, a maximum storage of 10GB per user, and 8 dataset refreshes per day. If you want to share your reports with other users, they will need a Power BI Pro license too.
By contrast, a Power BI Premium license gives you a maximum dataset size of 10GB and up to 48 dataset refreshes per day. You will also gain access to more advanced features, including AI and machine learning cognitive services, paginated reports, deployment pipelines, and automatic page refresh. Power BI Premium also includes a report server.
However, even if you have a Power BI Premium license, you will need a Power BI Pro license to publish reports to the Power BI Service. Despite this, users with Power BI Free licenses will be able to view any reports within your Power BI Service tenant.
So, you might be wondering, which license should I opt for? Simply put, you should choose Power BI Premium over Power BI Pro if you have over 500 users, you work with very large datasets, you require dedicated capacities or you require a higher storage limit. If your requirements are less taxing, it might be more sensible to attain a Power BI Pro license instead.
Get in touch with Netitude today!
For more information on how to unlock your business’ true potential with Power BI, get in contact with the experts at Netitude today. Book a free consultation and explore the many business benefits of Power BI for your business, all under the guidance of Netitude.
