Digital transformation is rapidly accelerating the pace of modern business, driving new revenue through efficient processes and adding value to companies that successfully integrate new technology. However, this same transformation also proves bewildering to companies that don’t currently have the capacity to leverage information within their legacy systems. Many are finding a solution in the advanced data platform Snowflake.
Data migration to cloud technologies presents both opportunities and challenges for individual companies. Snowflake can help manage both. Consider some of the common pain points associated with legacy systems: lack of scalability, automation and insight generation through data analysis — these can all be solved with self-managed services. Additionally, the platform’s ability to shorten the migration process and therefore generate value from the effort sooner — combined with the increased capacity to meet the diverse roles and requirements of data consumers — is generating widespread interest.
But digital upgrades often come with a difficult transitionary period. Many companies are hesitant to invest the time, effort and costs necessary to complete these overhauls, especially as managing a mass movement of data requires a degree of specific technical expertise that many organizations currently lack.
Even with the potential difficulties, migrating to Snowflake is an operational and competitive necessity for many companies at this point. So let’s look into how you can prepare yourself and ease the transition.
Key Challenges When Migrating to Snowflake
The logistics of retiring a legacy system can be daunting for businesses that already house an extensive amount of data. Ultimately, migrating to Snowflake yields significant technical improvements to internal systems. Yet at the same time, there’s no denying that it’s a massive undertaking. And even with a well-developed Snowflake migration plan, the technical nature of digital transformation can create unexpected roadblocks along the way.
To illustrate the complications businesses face, let’s examine some of the most prominent challenges migration presents:
- Missing information on source data — in some cases, allocating resources toward sourcing is necessary as information gaps regarding existing sets can degrade their integrity
- Compatibility issues between Snowflake’s platform and a business’s current applications and tools
- Security concerns during the migration process can be acute for businesses with sensitive data
- Confusion surrounding data governance may cloud who has the right to alter, remove, create or approve data from the source
- Compliance challenges may present themselves in regard to moving, storing and maintaining old and unused data sets
- Managing the change, including training departments on new systems, adapting to issues as they arise, and effectively communicating the migration’s causes, benefits and challenges to stakeholders
Leveraging Expertise to Successfully Navigate the Migration Process
There are challenges; fortunately, there are also some best practices you can lean on to help manage a successful and efficient migrating to Snowflake. It’s important to remember that businesses take on an increasingly large amount of data each year. This means that companies need to plan for a continuous influx of data — even after information from preexisting systems has been migrated. Of course, this unmitigated data growth presents additional challenges — namely in terms of security.
Businesses approach security threats differently as threat levels increase. Companies can use the migration process to improve their processes around privacy and governance. However, this does add another layer of complexity to migration; on top of all these concerns, businesses have to simultaneously ensure that their tech stack is comprised of enterprise feature matches.
Clearly, effectively conducting this migration is an exhaustive process and numerous companies simply don’t have the bandwidth to oversee such a project. In many cases bringing in expert help can make the complicated migration process seamless, especially when attempting to build a framework that allows analysts to leverage critical information.
Growth Acceleration Partners: Accelerating Your Time to Value
Data migration is a necessity — but you don’t have to manage the challenges alone. That’s where Growth Acceleration Partners can help.
Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP) is a leading provider of data migration services. Their expertise in upgrading legacy systems to Snowflake can save businesses significantly in terms of time and resources, all while modernizing analytics capabilities.
If you’ve ever wished that you could create digital infrastructure with the push of a button, GAP has what you’re looking for. Their powerful Infrastructure as Code (IaC) “secret sauce” can automatically deploy both setup and configuration for cloud applications in a matter of hours.
Plus, this isn’t an out-of-the-box solution. GAP provides customized capabilities such as naming, sizing, streams and data sources to create a bespoke system for every customer. With a single command, they can deploy an entire “ready-made” platform on one or more customer environments, including Dev, Test and Prod. Ultimately, infrastructure automation powered by GAPBuilt Accelerators can save businesses months on engineering projects.
Many companies just don’t have the internal resources to effectively navigate Snowflake migration. However, companies that partner with GAP can leverage a team of specialists to ease implementation pains and quickly generate substantial ROI. Their focus on modernization, data ingestion and analytics can help businesses get more from an ever-increasing influx of information. Not to mention the fact that GAP experts can guide businesses through all the challenges that come with the migration process.
Make Your Snowflake Migration Seamless
The capacity to optimize through data-based decision-making is a competitive necessity in today’s environment. However, the challenges of a mass data migration still prove significant — including technical issues surrounding integration and incompatibility, organizational obstacles like employee training, and concerns surrounding security and compliance during the move.
All these problems can add to your budget for the transition ultimately reducing a project’s ROI. Furthermore, issues within your tech stack can reduce the efficacy of the cloud-based system for your organization.
Growth Acceleration Partners helps enterprises overcome these challenges, using their expertise to ease your transition to the cloud and set up a modern ecosystem. GAP provides businesses with world-class data and software engineering teams that specialize in modernization and data ingestion.
Are you ready to migrate your organization’s data? Reach out to GAP to ease the transition.
