The cloud has now become a well-established deployment option for business applications. It provides an exceptional ground for grounding the business intelligence systems, as it provides business agility,scalability, and lowers the total cost of ownership. So, it is a little uncharacteristic that although most applications have migrated to the cloud, data warehouses – the fundamental of any business intelligence structures – are still mostly on proposition.
Of course, that’s not entirely surprising given that businesses have invested heavily in an on-premise data warehouse technology, with strong concerns about protecting sensitive data. Being seamless, migration of the data warehouse to the cloud must ensure that additional cloud security measures are addressed.
Steps required to be supervised while migration of the Data Warehouses
Characterize the current data warehouse along multiple dimensions
Detailed analysis should be carried out to cover the sensitive data aspects very carefully. It should be taken under consideration on what options are provided by the cloud vendor, and what are the organizational needs for the confidentiality. Thorough analysis of the regulatory standards must be carried out.
There could be multiple business users and business units who are using the data. We can also ease out the migration process by prioritizing and breaking down the whole data warehouse into significant business process subject areas.
Select the right cloud vendor for your warehouse
There are numerous cloud providers out there in the market. Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azureare some of the market leaders in among cloud solution provider’s industry. Based on the outcome of the classification of the existing warehouse, we must create a matrix of the functionalities required vs. existing features in respective cloud provider’s environment and then make the final choice. Of course, the monetary expenses also play a vital role in making this decision.
Identify technology choices depending on theresiliency of concept projects
Choosing the appropriate database technology for hosting the warehouse is the most important technology decision to be made. You are required to identify the queries symbolizing the typical workload based on performance tests. The factorsneeded to be considered while making this decision are:
Data types needed by the application
- Database technologies available from the cloud provider
- Database features required
- Real-time data processing needs
- Number of concurrent users
- Performance needs etc.
The compute and the storage necessities will decide the infrastructure needed for hosting the data warehouse.
Preparing a surefire migration plan
Preparing a well thought out project plan is certainly crucial for a successful migration. You must primarily involve business users in the entire decision making and project plan. They should be fully aware of the migrationstrategy and in fact they mustcontribute in testing the new system.
Infrastructure readiness
Most data warehouse projects on the cloud are required to set up a VPC. A VPC houses the entire production warehouse setup. It is very important to create corresponding environments for development, UAT and QA to ensure smooth operations of the systems. Set up access control and security on each of the environments. Also lay out the complete architecture beforehand.
Complete the migration
Migration embroils initial movement of the old data followed by the incremental tug of the data from the various sources. A thoroughdescription needs to be in place that plots the source data elements to the target data elements. It is desirable to run the modeled data migration project in parallel with the legacy system so that it is easier to test and determine the success of the migration. The migration and extraction needs to be setup in a repeated manner so that in case there are some concerns with the migration, it can be re-processed.
Test the success of migration
In the primary stage of the data migration, we typically test and compare one or several sample queries and data sets. In addition, we would like to commend comparison of row counts of objects, min and max values as well as sample data row assessments. Outlining the success criteria for the migration and testing is of greatest importance to ensure long term success of the cloud data warehouse. You also need to reassure that incremental data loads work correctly throughout.
Conclusion
Nowadays, there has been a lot of support for data warehouses in the cloud. Moving data warehouses to the cloud is yielding real business benefits, since many vendors are expanding the breadth and depth of services for warehousing and analysis of the data. However, migration is not exempted of challenges. Make sure you think through all the different aspects of data warehouse migration and then come up with aninfallible plan to address those challenges.
