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Data Migration to Snowflake: How We Do It?

11.02.2021

In this article, we will share some of our experiences and best practices gained in the last two decades on more than 150 data warehouse modernisation projects across a wide range of industries.

You can imagine we have come a long way to get here. Alongside various projects we completed, we had to face many different challenges. We learned the hard way that some routes are just unnecessary detours. Luckily, each of them gave us a bunch of experience and knowledge to discover much faster roads getting you directly to the final destination.

Many challenges reoccurred in each project. We tried to automate the steps that needed to be done repeatedly to speed up the processes and improve their efficiency and quality. Each time we did it a bit better than before and each time the clients got more added value from us.

You can trust us and we can assure you that it doesn’t pay to take the longer route. It is not a scenic one. It includes many dangerous sections and blind spots. As we’ve been there several times, we can offer you guidance to accomplish your migration journey much faster and with less risk.

Because we don’t know each other yet, let us introduce ourselves with some quick facts about our company – In516ht, pronounced as insight. 

End-to-end Support with a Proven Track Record

We work across the full data stack and have accomplished hundreds of analytics projects. Ranging from heavy lifting data integrations, complex data warehouse modernizations and large-scale business intelligence solutions to smart data visualizations projects, innovative AI applications and performance management solution (planning, budgeting, forecasting, profitability).

Bringing Business and Technology Together

Rich technical expertise is of great importance, but experiences have taught us that success comes from understanding your industry. Therefore, we build our teams as a mix of business professionals with deep industry domain knowledge and technology experts who are best at solving complex analytical challenges. Working together they overcome knowledge boundaries, broaden the horizons, trigger creativity, and inspire innovation. 

Passion for Innovation

Supported by best-of-breed technologies and driven by the desire to excel in quality and reduce project delivery time, we developed innovative assets. Built as easily adjustable frameworks, they automate repeatable steps and empower business users to take matters into their own hands. Or give you a head start by leveraging best practices prep-acked in industry solutions.

Methodology to Best Serve the Customer

Building a lasting relationship with clients is very important for us, so we leave nothing to chance. From the first discovery workshops, throughout the implementation and up to the post-go-live activities. We put a lot of effort in developing a proven methodology at each step making sure projects are completed on time, on budget and with minimum risk as possible.  

Premier Snowflake Partner

Our strategic focus for the last years is on the modernization of existing data platforms with a cloud-first strategy. We devoted a lot of time to establishing and optimizing the best practice approach for development, modernization and migration projects on the Snowflake Data Cloud. As such, we’ve became one of the leading Snowflake partners in Europe and one of the first Premier Snowflake partners with close to twenty certified experts. We are proud of being able to substantiate our competence with the CEE Snowflake person of the year award, received from our strategic partner.

That was a bit about us. The year 2020 taught us to connect and work remotely as one no matter how far apart we are. Thanks to our methodology and teamwork, all the projects in progress are continuing without a glitch even though we had no in-person contact for months. We believe that this may also be one of the reasons to take a deeper look at how your company could benefit from our services.

Data warehouse migration is rarely a stand-alone project. Most often it accompanies a larger innovation or modernization project, whose success closely depends on the quality of migration. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. What’s more, there are countless variations on how to approach the migration. To make it even more complex, large-scale projects can last for a year or more and often do not end as expected. Yes, a lot is at stakes, but with our many years of experience, you can minimize the risk. 

Each migration can be broken down into the pre-migration phase, migration itself and the post-migration phase.  We can help with all these steps.

Advisory Services Before the Migration to Snowflake

To start with, we can offer you guidance through all the topics and questions that need to be addressed before you decide on your future platform and migration approach.

The next step is the development of a data-driven strategy. To be able to embrace a cloud platform at its maximum, it is important that you are very familiar with all the capabilities it offers. As this is your to-be platform, there is a high likelihood that you are not yet as masterful in it as in the existing system.

We possess two strong skill sets, we feel very much at home with Snowflake technology and we have a strong industry domain knowledge in banking, insurance, telco, energy and retail sectors and we feel competent to assist. By being aware of emerging trends in your industry and your business needs we can create highly valuable and creative solutions that cannot be built in legacy systems. Considering your challenges, opportunities and business priorities, we can help you to lay down:

  • A roadmap that will embed analytics into your business processes in alignment with your short- and long-term strategic goals.
  • The architecture that will be scalable and flexible enough to support your growth and new analytics requirements.
  • The detailed realistic migration plan set in a way that it will start returning value in the shortest possible time.

You can count on our guidance on all the topics that need to be covered within an efficient plan and we can also help with the assessment of your current environment. We wrote more about this subject here (A Well-made Migration Plan), but if there is one subject that needs to be highlighted it is the team and methodology. We can’t stress out enough how important it is, to form a strong team with clearly defined responsibilities and establish strong project management. We are glad to share with you our proven methodology for project delivery, mitigating the risk and assuring that all members are aligned at all times.

It’s one thing to draw a great blueprint and something quite else to turn it into reality. However, we are not just a consultancy firm. We like to get our hands dirty. We have a strong implementation team of senior architects, engineers and project managers.

Migrating to Snowflake?

Snowflake Services

Dive in with Snowflake Innovation partner of the year in EMEA region

Implementation Services Accelerating Your Migration

We grew with the evolving data world long before modern cloud platforms appeared. This allowed us to gain years of experience in building and migrating complex legacy data warehouses on different technologies such as IBM Netezza Performance Server, Oracle Exadata and Microsoft SQL.

We can support you with end-to-end implementations services including migrations of existing data models, complex data integrations and data warehouse modernisations. Of course, you can always count on our support and knowledge sharing.

With in-depth expertise in both legacy technologies and modern Snowflake Data Cloud, we were able to develop a proven data integration methodology and innovative technology assets that can help you significantly accelerate your journey to the cloud.

Don’t forget that migration is an iterative process. Having as much automation as possible brings many invaluable advantages such as automated technical tests, assuring that the data is properly migrated and the ability to repeat data transformation tasks and apply new changes with almost no effort. Not to mention soft benefits such as stress reduction that come along as a side effect.

You can learn more about our tools that can make your project 10-times faster, more efficient, and far less risky in comparison to traditional methods in our webinars.

Getting the Most Value Out of Your New Data Platform

After the migration is completed, it’s time to start taking advantage of the new capabilities. We are here to help you implement new advanced analytical use cases to get the most value out of your new platform.

Snowflake Data Cloud Test Drive (POC)

If you are still deciding on technology, Snowflake offers a free test drive. This way you can experience a modern cloud data platform with your data first-hand. If you need help on maximizing the value of your proof-of-concept project, contact our team or continue reading the next article. (How to Get the Most Out of POC).