In this article Dan D’Orazio a Solution Architect at Matillion talks about Modern data warehouses purpose-built for cloud solutions can enable speed, simplicity, scale, and savings while delivering the high-performance that enables enterprises to fully leverage their data to glean valuable insights.
All enterprises know their power is in the ability to leverage data to compete. The speed at which organizations can collect, process, and analyze data is the main indicator for the companies that will lead in their market. Data warehouse infrastructure plays a critical role, and traditional, legacy data warehouses are feeling the strain of data volume growth.
These legacy warehouses were not built to handle the demands and velocities of modern data. While functionally rich and mature, these systems are slow, difficult to manage and scale, hard to procure, and unable to take advantage of the underlying power and features of cloud platforms. Pairing this with the growing varieties, volumes, and velocities of data that strain an organization’s data warehouse and existing BI processes unearths platform limitations that are not easily overcome. This impacts an organization’s ability to be agile, in turn restricting its ability to be insights-driven.
Modern data warehouses purpose-built for the cloud solve these challenges, during a time when companies deal with ever-increasing data volumes. Only the cloud can enable speed, simplicity, scale, and savings while delivering the high-performance that enables enterprises to fully leverage their data to glean valuable insights.
Modernizing your Data Warehouse
How can you start your data warehouse modernization? Begin by understanding how, when and why you should modernize. Next, implement a cloud data warehouse (CDW) that can meet your growing data needs. Then find solutions that are purpose-built and can work with your data needs.
Uncovering Actionable Insights
You’ve implemented a CDW to find all of the hidden value within your data and set yourself up for success. Now, you need to uncover actionable insights.
Reporting and operational dashboards benefit from cleaned, curated, and homogenous data. Modern CDWs can handle higher volumes of data in a variety of formats. Most traditional, on-premises data warehouses will have technical challenges if you try to integrate existing operational data with various formats of data. They aren’t designed to consume the latter types of data, which leaves you with few options. CDWs and cloud-based ETL solutions enable a centralized place for data that you can transform, enrich, and extract for insights all in one place, providing you a single source of truth.
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Purpose-built Solutions for Your CDW
Since most legacy tooling isn’t purpose-built, you need to choose cloud-native tools that unlock the reasons you transitioned to a CDW.
Traditional ETL tools aren’t built for the cloud, so they don’t take advantage of the inherent flexibility and native improvements of a CDW. In fact, traditional ETL tools can treat your CDW like any old data warehouse, which results in the same old performance setbacks. This will have you questioning why you migrated in the first place. Instead, evaluate cloud-native solutions to best meet your modern data needs.
Perform a variety of tests to familiarize yourself with the new technology . You will want to test both simple and challenging tasks, along with your poorest performing workloads. A key benefit of the cloud is the ability to leverage new resources on demand. Take advantage of that!
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Best practices for Successful Cloud Data Migrations
Here are some best practices for successful cloud data migrations:
- Do a thorough evaluation – Evaluate new, cloud-native solutions that will meet your specific use case and business needs.
- Get buy-in from stakeholders – Include a variety of stakeholders like business analysts, data scientists, project managers, etc. Gather requirements, show them the proof-of-concept results, and reveal benefits early to keep the team aligned.
- Find an expert partner – Work with partners that can help guide your cloud data management strategy. They save your team a lot of time and effort and can even provide documentation, training, and proper handoff.
- Have a flexible plan – Take advantage of the flexibility the cloud offers. If something is not working as expected, go back to your evaluation, identify the missing criteria, and then come up with a new plan.
The cloud gives us a lot of options when it comes to storing and processing data. A modern cloud data management strategy will give your business a competitive advantage. As you move to the cloud, there is a lot you’ll need to keep in mind.
Changing the way you think about your data architecture, by leveraging the power of the cloud, will enable you to explore your data in a new light, and empower you to unearth insights about your customers, improve efficiency in your operations, and solve your biggest business challenges.
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