It may take a long time for certain companies to notice the results of their move from on-premise to cloud-based systems. This article is not meant to discourage anyone, but instead to make sure that everyone is aware of the situation. It is wise to take a look at what should be built, bought and delegated to other businesses. Some might assume that the only way to be in control and still have some freedom is to construct the system internally, even if it takes more time to do so.
However, there are alternatives that can prove that this is not necessarily the case. Here is an example of how a detailed evaluation and the right tools can help a large financial services firm reduce its deployment time by two years.
Well done! You've done your due diligence, compared many choices of cloud data warehouses (CDWs), earned approval from the relevant parties in your company, and are ready to move ahead with Snowflake, Redshift, Delta Lake, or any other CDW. Now you can envision new possibilities of business intelligence (BI), analytics, and machine learning. CDWs offer more speed, efficiency, and better value compared to the older, on-premises models. However, there is still a lot of work to be done and the decisions you make now can determine how soon you will reach the desired success - will it take days, months, or even years?
The arena of ETL has advanced from its on-site origin, yet designing and controlling the data pipelines that will supply analytics-ready data to consumers of data can still be very labour-intensive. The following are five methods for reducing those labour requirements and shortening your timeline to a successful CDW initiation.
Discover an interface for any data source.
Even though you may have a large, capable team of data engineers that have written code for merging data sources in the past and may even enjoy doing so, most of them would prefer to leave this often tedious job. Nevertheless, this is a great chance to expedite your data warehouse migration. Plenty of teams before you have required connectors for databases, files, apps, or events. There are various pre-constructed connector apparatuses available that cover the majority of most organizations' sources of data. Of course, you likely have some special data sources that are exclusive to your field or even your company. But just as with pre-built connectors, you will benefit from the experience of a vendor who has frameworks and experience that is specifically tailored to dealing with custom sources.
Establish an automated system for the infrastructure.
Instead of dealing with physical server maintenance in a data center, you have now moved to the cloud; however, you can still overburden your team with infrastructure work if you don't pay attention. Data transport and preparation involves organizing tasks, allocating computer clusters, searching for the best cost and performance, and more. To free up your squad from such engineering tasks, there are various alternatives, ranging from open source orchestrators and serverless choices to fully supervised pipeline tools.
Allow everyone to have access to data creation.
It is typical to view data democratization mostly as a result of a CDW endeavor that is successful. Granting dashboards and data sets to more data users is certainly essential for an information literate organisation. It is also vital to provide the producers of the data, those who are most familiar with its meaning and background, with the necessary tools. Without this, a central team is left to pick the data and deliver it with value and meaning to data consumers. They will either spend innumerable hours examining each domain and data source or create a CDW that users cannot make sense of and do not believe. A more effective approach is to equip subject experts with no-code tools to directly construct pipelines and ready the data for analytics.
Do not overlook the process of troubleshooting.
When implementing a CDW, it is effortless to focus mainly on the data engineering aspect. In many cases, data engineers spend a lot of their time trying to troubleshoot. There are monitoring instruments to help, as well as coding for warning alerts. A more helpful approach is to use a completely managed pipeline platform that offers these features without any extra effort and can solve issues before they reach your team. By following the five tips listed, it will bring an increase in the CDW's uptime, which is an essential relief for data engineers. It is also necessary to ensure value is obtained, which is based on the trust and adoption of data users.
Be prepared for what may come unexpectedly.
It may seem like automation has already addressed all that needs to be done and the range of tools out there can handle any situation. However, that is not the case. There is no single perfect solution and it is important to be cautious of any promises of a fully automated pipeline. The data sources and destinations may vary and you might want to add things like a business catalogue or a data quality procedure to the system. Invest in tools or services that are flexible enough to adjust to your special circumstances. You can save a lot of time with rigid automation but you may end up spending the same amount of time trying to work around any special cases.
It may take a long time for certain organizations to reap the rewards of transferring from on-premise to CDW. The objective of this article is not to be depressing, but to guarantee that you progress with caution. It can be beneficial to gauge where your organization should construct or purchase or join forces with another company. A lot of people assume they must develop internally to keep control and be adjustable, and they are willing to invest a lot more time in doing so. However, there are alternatives that make this an erroneous exchange.