5 STEPS TO ENSURE THE

SUCCESS OF YOUR CLOUD

DATA MIGRATION
Mature organizations have been historically slow to place business data in the
cloud. Today, however, the cloud is no longer synonymous with risk. And
cloud adoption is driven by concrete business reasons, including the need to
accelerate digital transformation and make data a strategic asset.

For these reasons, the vendor landscape has grown crowded; analyst evaluations
of cloud databases and data warehouses include more than 20 participating
vendors. Furthermore, business adoption is so significant, many vendors have
earned substantial market capitalization.

Yet moving from on-premises data environments to the cloud is an incredibly

complex and technical challenge. In fact, a report from Cloud Security Alliance
finds that 90% of CIOs have come in contact with failed or disrupted data
migration initiatives. Worse, extended timelines are the norm. Just 25% of the
CIOs surveyed in this study met their deadlines for migrations, with respondents
sharing that the average timeline was one year.

Despite the challenges of migration, one thing is clear: cloud data is here to
stay. But how do organizations ensure they create tangible business value
with a cloud data warehouse?

Business Drivers for Cloud Data Warehousing

CIOs firmly agree that cost alone can never be the driver of cloud data
warehousing. This is for two reasons. First, CIOs want to invest in things that
drive a business outcome. If there’s no business outcome then there’s no
investment. At the same time, CIOs are clear that if there ever was a cost
advantage to cloud, those days are gone. Former CIO Isaac Sacolick says it’s
“a common misconception that cloud data warehouses and lakes are cheap
or don’t require IT ops support.”

Instead, top reasons for cloud adoption are agility, innovation, security,
the need to adopt new capabilities, and faster time to value. Sacolick adds,
“Cloud data warehouses provide a lot of upfront agility, especially with
serverless databases. There are tools to replicate, snapshot data, plus tools
to scale and improve performance.”

The need to aggregate and simplify data are also popular motivators. Many
businesses have different types of data in different systems and infrastructure;

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for them, cloud makes sense as a single point of aggregation. This means
cloud data warehouses can solve business data problems that are larger and
more complex than what could be addressed with on-premises software
and hardware.

The Starting Point for Cloud Data Migration

Data leaders agree: you do not want to lift and shift data from on-premise
databases to a cloud data warehouse. Lift and shift leads to fixing what is
there, fixing it again, and finally getting it reengineered — and maybe still
getting it wrong again. The risks of lift and shift include moving stale data,
bad data, and data that’s never used. The business impacts of moving bad
data specifically include:

• Unnecessarily incurred cloud costs

• Confusion around what data to use
• People continuing to use bad data

How can data leaders ensure this doesn’t happen? It starts with a plan.

Proper Planning
Instead of lift and shift, leaders should map out a strategy and plan what
to migrate, how to migrate it, and when to migrate it. Remember, a cloud
data migration requires careful planning, design, and execution. With the
right planning, migrations can be done in one fell swoop versus multiple
expensive interactions.

For this reason, it is smart to develop a data warehouse plan early, while
establishing holistic, enterprise-level governance and data management for
both the infrastructure and warehouse components. Proper scoping of this
effort matters because incorrect scoping poses significant risk; it and could
increase the cost or underestimate the cost to migrate.

Modernize the Data

Data leaders recommend you clean out your closet before you move into
a new house. You don’t want to bring over the same garbage data or broken
integrations. Where possible, IT teams should start as clean and fresh as they
can. At the same time, it is important to modernize data and fix data quality

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issues before migrating data into a cloud data warehouse. This includes not
moving useless data — but migrating only data that matters to the people
who use it.

Discover the Data Relationships

Before you migrate, identifying data interdependencies is important. It’s key
to understanding data and data relationships, but also for establishing data
governance and data management in the process. Data discovery and
relationship mapping will help you achieve faster business value from a cloud
data warehouse. Such a map helps you understand the metadata and data
definitions around different data sets. Data warehousing decisions should
be based on business need and data integrity requirements that support
business requirements.

5 Steps to Leading a Successful Cloud

Data Migration
Organizations need to have a clear process for strategizing and then planning
a cloud data warehouse initiative. In the strategizing process, organizations
should first determine their business requirements. This should include assigning
the drivers for this initiative.

The next step is defining data warehouse requirements. The goal is to accelerate
the migration from a conventional, on-premise analytic database such as Oracle,
Teradata, SQL Server, etc., to cloud-based analytic databases such as Amazon
Redshift or Snowflake.

By combining a template-based configuration of a data catalog with a prescriptive

process, organizations can move confidently and quickly through the migration
process. Importantly, this approach replaces a largely manual and error-prone
approach using a mashup of tools… with a single unified environment for
analyzing sources, understanding dependencies, mapping source to targets,
and tracking through completion.

Alation can help customers adapt and blend this approach to support their
business requirements. The data catalog can be used with the customers’ or
their systems integrators’ approach and project management standards.

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An embedded assumption is that the cloud migration effort will focus upon
rapid “relocation” of existing capabilities and not redesign of data models,
ETL processing, report production processes, etc. Naturally, there are capability
differences between database environments. These differences will require
some adjustments but where possible these will be kept to an absolute minimum.
It’s assumed that reengineering for process and performance optimization will be
approached as a separate project after the cloud migration has been completed.

The cloud migration approach has five phases as shown in the image below.

1. Startup
The startup phase is focused on ensuring you have the right team, infrastructure,
and processes in place to execute a migration efficiently. In this phase, a working
data catalog environment is installed and configured, and an inventory of data
and data-bearing assets are cataloged.

It is critical that a clear definition of the overall approach — including roles and
processes — is established. So on day 1 of migration, your core team responsible
is trained and ready to begin.

2. Analysis and Disposition

This phase focuses on gathering requirements and defining an execution plan.
During this phase, organizations understand and document dependent assets;
this includes reports, queries, ETL, etc. During this phase, organizations want to
evaluate asset usage patterns and popularity in order to make determinations
on what will and will not be migrated. As well, this enables a priority to be
established for assets to migrate.

3. Initial Migration
With the above accomplished, it’s now time to execute the plan defined in the
prior phase. The execution phase consists of:

1. Evaluating data quality

2. Mapping sources to target tables
3. Running initial data migration jobs so work changing dependent
assets (reports, queries, ETL, etc.) can be started
4. Initial migration of dependent assets
5. Cataloging migration lineage

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4. Revise and Test Dependent Assets
This phase is focused on testing the results of the initial migration and correcting
for any issues. During this phase, organizations should establish appropriate
access rights based on role; validate and correct migrated data assets; and
change and test dependent assets as necessary.

5. Production Prep and Cutover

The last phase in the process is focused on the production cutover. This phase
includes the following tasks:

• Testing the complete migration job sequencing

• Validating dependent assets
• Cutover dry run(s)
• The final production cutover

Analysis &
Disposition

Initial Revise & Test

Migration Dependent Assets
Production Prep &
Evaluate
Popularity
Cutover

Start Up Evaluate Assign

Data Quality Access Rights
Identify
Dependent Sequence &
Confirm Queries
Install & Create Asset Create Work Test Migration
Workflow &
Configure Inventories Assignments Revise & Test
Ramp Team Remediate
Processing
Data Quality
Identify Assets
Dependent Test
Create Define Reports Dependent
Install
Platform
SQL Disposition Rules Assets
Inventory & Procedures
Map Source Revise & Test
to Target Query Assets
Identify
Create Review Dependent Perform
Load Template Mapping to
Configuration
Report Processing Cutover
Inventory Cutover Process
Dry Run
Define
Revise & Test
Reconciliation
Review & Create Onboard and Report Assets
Identify Tests
Modify Project Query Train Project
Templates Inventory Team Member Dependent Cutover &
SQL Go-Live
Develop, Run,
Create Revise & Test
Connect and Test
Data Sources Processing SQL Assets
Inventory Identify Data Migration
Dependent
Access Rights

Decide
Migration
Disposition

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Customer Case Studies
Texas Mutual Insurance

“Alation was critical in determining the priorities and

sequence at which data assets and key user groups
were migrated to Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Alation’s
intuitive design allowed us to migrate our data and
users with clarity and transparency, and because key
user groups were notified that pertinent data was
migrating, we saw greater adoption of the Data Cloud.”
Anthony Seraphim
Vice President of Data Governance, Texas Mutual Insurance

Travelers
Travelers migrated to the cloud successfully and provided scalability for
enterprise-wide data democratization. As they approached their cloud data
migration, leaders determined they needed to prioritize data migration to provide
a way to leverage data in a new cloud environment for analytic solutions. This
meant determining a data migration plan based on insights on popularity, usage
of the data, and users. It also meant identifying redundancies in data and data
not being used and signaling opportunities to decommission legacy systems
and reduce storage costs.

At the same time, they needed improved curation to support encryption and
cybersecurity, ensuring data privacy protection practices are in place. This
meant creating a single location for insights so users can leverage the cloud
environment for their data and analytics needs.

How Alation Helps

Alation enables organizations to accelerate their cloud data migration or
launch of a new cloud data warehouse with clear business objectives. Alation
does this by helping organizations speed the planning phase of their cloud
data migration. As discussed, a simple lift and shift will not achieve the business

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goals for a cloud migration and will cost significantly more than an approach
that instead focuses on migrating what matters. It is better to right-size
workloads to meet business requirements.

This ensures the success of cloud data warehouses — and most critically,
speeds up the planning phase. Use of Alation Data Catalog keeps you
focused on data that supports customer requirements. Most importantly,
this eliminates lengthy manual effort inventorying data. Automating the
inventory of the data environment and understanding metadata and data
definitions around different data sets reduces the planning process while
enabling more careful execution.

With Alation, you can determine what makes sense to migrate and in which
order. In addition, you can ensure related data and assets are migrated
together. The data catalog traces and identifies data asset relationships and
dependencies automatically. This shortens the migration process and makes
it easier to discover data that relates to business requirements.

By migrating only what is necessary, you complete the migration in a single

shot. The business impact includes reducing license and storage costs for
on-premises capacity sooner — while retiring legacy unused systems faster.
But most importantly, you can complete the cloud data warehouse, and drive
business value, faster.

Alation accelerates value delivery by enabling users to self-discover the

value created.

This includes for business analysis and modeling: Organizations pay only for
what people really use. This will:

• Lower TCO, eliminating legacy hardware and software faster

• Reduce license costs for on-premises capability
• Reduce time running on-premises and cloud in parallel
• Move only data with downstream value
• Ensure data that matters is discovered and related data assets
are migrated together

Curious to learn more about how Alation can make your cloud migration
a success? Get in touch today.

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