In the work we do with our customers, we always seek repeatable patterns. What do we observe and enact time and again? Is this a widely applicable problem? Can we address it through the use of a well-developed framework or automation?
Similarly, we identify recurring patterns in our customers' pain points and the challenges they face. Many of our customers are tackling the move from legacy data warehouses to modern data platforms, and here’s a pattern we’ve seen emerge:
The Conundrum
The customer has had a legacy on-premise data warehouse for years, decades even. Their data journey has been a successful one. Data and insights are integrated into everything they do - engrained in their decision making, integral to operations, critical to understanding their success and creating a competitive edge. They need to take the next step and ensure their data foundations can support data at scale, AI, and enable data democratisation. But they’re bogged down in keeping the lights on. The risk of a complex and lengthy migration, that leaves them with multiple data platforms to support for an extended period, is too high.
These are the organisations that absolutely need to modernise, but their data success is a double edged sword. They need to redirect their engineering and analyst effort to value creation, not chasing operational and engineering issues like a game of whack-a-mole, or labouring with poor tooling and compute that isn’t fit for purpose for the types of analysis they need to perform. These are also the organisations that have a more complex migration journey, more stakeholders to keep happy, and higher migration risk.
The Compelling Event
Eventually, a tipping point is reached. Strategy has been set, the modern data platform journey has begun, but the journey continues to stretch out and the destination seems more and more out of reach. Best will in the world, the engineering team are trying to migrate to modern, but it’s a hefty task when done in parallel with managing legacy workloads, and more data assets are being created every week…because, well, data doesn’t stop. Then legacy licence renewal comes around, or it’s upgrade time because the current version is no longer supported, and the upgrade will take a month. The business misses a big opportunity or there is a regulatory mishap. The need to migrate swiftly and decommission legacy goes from nice-to-have to critical.
Does this ring true for your organisation? Qrious can help.
We’ve been migrating legacy to modern for many years, for many customers. Our industry-tested methodologies and frameworks help to find the signal in the migration noise and develop a plan, then support you in the execution. Licence our automation products to reduce the manual effort, increase the quality, and reduce the risk of modern data platform implementations and migration programmes. Use Godwit to automate the migration of critical data transformation business logic from legacy to modern and use Fantail to automate the validation of the results.
Get in touch and we can talk you through how we can help.