Migrating Your Data Warehouse to the Cloud? Don’t Skip These Two Critical Steps.

By Robert Stackowiak.  

In this blog I discuss the challenges of evaluating cloud data warehouse options, how to assess your data warehouse and build an optimized cloud migration roadmap that ensures your success.

Many companies are evaluating moving of their data and analytics infrastructure from an on-premises data warehouse to a more modern cloud-based solution. Whether it is AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics, Google Big Query or Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, there is an expectation that a cloud-based solution can provide faster time to critical business analyses, greater flexibility and scalability, more predictable availability and security, and possible cost savings.

Data Warehouse Size and Complexity Make Them Challenging to Migrate to the Cloud 

I’ve spent over three decades in data warehousing, analytics and cloud computing with companies such as Oracle and Microsoft. I’ve learned a lot from working with customers seeking to get the most value at a manageable cost from their data and analytics on premises, and now in the cloud. Today’s challenge for organizations considering moving their data warehouses to the cloud stems from three trends:

  1. Data warehouses have been around for decades and are large and complex.
  2. Many organizations do not fully understand how their data warehouse is used by the business.
  3. Migrating a large data warehouse to the cloud can be a complicated and risky process without a thorough understanding of your data warehouse usage and business objectives.

Two Critical Steps to Ensure An Effective Cloud Data Warehouse

Customers successfully migrating to cloud data warehouse platforms understand these issues. They take a two-step process to ensure they can get to the cloud cost-efficiently and take advantage of cloud specific features to create a data warehouse that meets needs today and can scale and adapt quickly to rapidly changing business demands.

Step 1.  Conducting An Effective Evaluation/POC

The first step is to set the right expectations regarding performance and cost in a cloud-based solution. Successful migrations start with an evaluation or proof of concept (POC) of a representative workload from the current data warehouse platform be tested on the proposed cloud platform in a proof of concept. This is the most accurate way to determine possible tradeoffs in moving your most important workloads to the cloud.

Step 2.  Building an Optimized Migration Plan to Reduce Effort and Cost and Increase Business Value

In the second step, the complexity of a full migration is assessed. Decisions are made regarding what must be migrated with priorities established for migrating specific business areas. This information is critical to obtaining an accurate estimate of the cost and risks of the migration itself.

Software and Services to Automate and Accelerate Cloud POC’s and Migrations

Teleran has developed two services that automate, accelerate and improve the accuracy to these two steps. For the first step, Teleran offers a Cloud Data Warehouse Evaluation Advisor service. This service uses a fact-based approach by first gathering current data warehouse usage activity through its patented software and generating reports containing key metrics. The service speeds identification of the most representative POC workload through analysis of this data. The workload can then be tested on the proposed cloud platform where you can measure performance, scalability and flexibility of the cloud-based platform and determine likely costs of running on a particular cloud platform. A preview as to the potential complexity and level-of-effort of a full migration is also obtained as some of the code conversions needed for testing in the cloud are identified.

For the second step, Teleran offers a Cloud Migration Assessment that uncovers the full scope of code conversions and other migration activities that will be necessary. Needless planning for migration of infrequently utilized or unused scripts and data can be eliminated and the time and cost needed for a full migration can be greatly reduced. Operational cost savings in the cloud-based solution can be assured through adopting suggested optimizations. A migration roadmap is created based upon priorities identified by key business area usage of the current data warehouse platform.

In summary, these two Teleran service offerings help you properly assess the time and cost of moving your data warehouse to the cloud, can reduce the scope of the migration, and can uniquely give insight into what your ongoing costs and benefits will be once you move there.

 

Robert Stackowiak

Robert has over 30 years’ experience in data warehousing, analytics and cloud computing with companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, Known as a change agent using insightful techniques, Robert uncovers business and technical needs helping clients and teaching others in defining new analytics cloud-based architectures and solutions enabling digital transformation.

linkedin.com/in/robertstackowiak

 

 

 

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