How Nissan Middle East FZE standardized interactive data visualization by implementing the “PowerBI Report Server” platform on AWS that drove faster and smarter decisions leading to 21% increment in net profit - Beinex

How Nissan Middle East FZE standardized interactive data visualization by implementing the “PowerBI Report Server” platform on AWS that drove faster and smarter decisions leading to 21% increment in net profit

About PowerBI Report Server
PowerBI Report Server is an online platform that allows users to host and manage Tableau data sources, workbooks, reports, and dashboards created on PowerBI Pro. One can access PowerBI Report Server from a web browser to create new workspaces, publish reports and dashboards, and share them with other users.

While sharing the content, permissions can be given to each user that restricts them from editing, applying different types of filters, and sharing it further. Users can create apps and add specific visuals to create live dashboards that can be accessed through smartphones and tablets. Moreover, one can collaborate with other designers and administrators to work together and create highly customized reports for a particular field.
3 Jul 2023
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    Challenge
    1. The IT infrastructure of Nissan Middle East FZE where the PowerBI Report Server platform was hosted was in an on-premise datacenter which was designed to be scalable and robust with multi node physical clusters including the server, storage and network components. However, most of the physical hardware was quite old and not equipped with the latest generation of physical servers.
    2. Frequent hardware crashes and portal downtime kept troubling the availability of the PowerBI Report Server application. Assigning a touch hand support person to power on the hardware that was down seemed quite impossible due the restrictions during covid period. Hence, Nissan Middle East FZE wanted to look for another viable solution.
    3. Though the hardware setup at Nissan Middle East FZE was well equipped to meet the occasional spikes in the traffic, it was observed that over a course of 6-month time, most of the IT infra was underutilized than predicted. It was realized that spending huge amount of money on an old hardware plus software maintenance, license costs, internet bandwidth, datacenter cooling and maintenance, touch support personnel and electricity costs – were keeping the business operations challenging.
    4. There was an attempt by Nissan Middle East FZE to select a cost-effective solution that can host PowerBI Report Server application servers, web servers and archival data. This way IT infra can be re-provisioned to host sensitive data on-premise and the rest on the cloud, thereby reducing the overall physical hardware costs spent on a yearly basis.
    Why AWS
    1. Nissan Middle East FZE decided to migrate PowerBI Report Server, database servers and archival data to AWS.
    2. The PowerBI Report Server’s AWS architecture includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), that provides complete control of its computing resources, updates to tables in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and AWS Elastic Load Balancer was used to distribute the traffic to the underlying EC2 instances based on the load.
    Benefits
  • Nissan Middle East FZE uses AWS services to provision infrastructure and deploy the PowerBI Report Server platform to other departments within it. In addition, the PowerBI Report Server resources that are no longer required to be run all the time are made to auto shutdown thus saving cost. Nissan Middle East FZE reported a 28% cost reduction after implementation of AWS for the PowerBI Report Server platform.
  • The implementation of PowerBI Report Server on AWS made Nissan Middle East FZE confident in the security of its data, and its accreditation team is enthusiastic about the monitoring and auditing capabilities provided by AWS tools. With the implementation of IAM roles, Nissan Middle East FZE IT team was able to isolate systems and tightly control user accesses. These capabilities were harder to achieve within the existing infra but were available out of the box with AWS
  • By adopting AWS to host the PowerBI Report Server platform, Nissan Middle East FZE has been able to innovate and experiment to a degree previously impossible. For example, Nissan Middle East FZE compared the performance and cost-effectiveness of three different cloud solutions. Without moving to the AWS, the costs associated with running an outdated on-premise hardware would have creeped up and the alternative way of upgrading the existing on-prem infrastructure to the latest hardware models and then hosting the PowerBI Report Server application on top of it would have taken months.
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