//What we accomplished for our clients
Revamp Your Data Warehouse for Increased Performance with Effective Costs
// Overview
About Our Client
The beneficiary of the data modernization solution is a global biopharma company that brings meaningful impact on peoples’ lives through biopharmaceutical innovations.
In order to do this, it relies heavily on analytics of huge amounts of data exploited by thousands of users in all departments: production, commercial, supply chain, finance, HR, legal. Residing in Belgium, the company is powered by approximately 8,700 people across 40 countries worldwide, and generates revenues of billions every year.
Client:
Global biopharma company
industry:
Biotechnology
Pharmaceutical
Level of Services
Software development
Standardized ITMS Services
Risk & system analysis
Business Need
The main need the company addressed was to reduce the costs of the constantly growing data infrastructure, especially the expenses with the infrastructure, realization, maintenance, and use of the backups that were consuming more and more resources every year.
Since the support for the old technology stored on dedicated hardware had expired, the client decided on the modernization of their data infrastructure. This involved migrating from on-premises databases that stored the company’s data warehouses to cloud databases.
The modernization also involved making adaptations for the new cloud technology to be compatible with the data structures inherited from the old hardware infrastructure. This was the most challenging part of the project and also our team’s favorite.
Solution
The modernization project resulted in a modern, secure, and highly scalable data infrastructure that benefits from all the advantages of exploiting and adapting the fast and mature cloud technology. Having now a solution that is scalable on-the-fly, the client can add or remove new data processing units, being in control of the costs.
A very specific feature of the new data infrastructure is time travel. Now the users can consume data up to 90 days behind. For instance, they can retrieve the data warehouse status or a table at any given moment back to up to 90 days. With the previous solution the client was using, this retrieving process was much more resource-consuming.
To track costs, dashboards were developed implemented in the cloud infrastructure to facilitate breaking down total maintenance costs per data owner (business department).
Team Expertise
In order to successfully deliver this data modernization project, our cross-functional team made use of their sharp development and testing skills, rigorous project management and clean communication among its members and with the client side.
First and foremost, we offered the client tech and business know-how to help them choose from a list of technologies available the one that met their data modernization needs and comply with SQL standards. We built a successful proof of concept with Snowflake which we later on exploited and adapted to modernize the entire stack of assets.
The migration team dealt with a complex ecosystem with data warehouses being supplied from multiple sources. Nevertheless, they ensured business continuity and safe development on a critically necessary data infrastructure.
After migrating the data warehouses (approximately 30) into the cloud, our team made sure that all data are completely and correctly ingested. We are talking about 4000-5000 ELT jobs (extract-load-transform), part of which our skilled developers transformed from ETL (extract- transform-load) to ensure best performance.
Also, all applications populating the data warehouses, as well as those consuming the data in those warehouses, suffered the necessary adaptations and transformations for highest compatibility with the new cloud technology. All adaptations were accompanied by unit and dry run testing performed in a real-life acceptance environment that simulated the running of all the workloads and processes.
Security was ensured on all flanks. In terms of role-based access model, we replicated the role hierarchy in the new cloud databases. An important step was to open secure communication channels between the client’s infrastructure and the cloud technology, with private link that allows limiting the access points. Also, we created virtual machines in the client network from where the cloud accesses the data and the servers consuming and publishing the data.
The most challenging parts of this project were also those with major impact on the business: secure communication channels, the acceptance and go-live activities. Despite their complexity, all of them were completed successfully, the client enjoying today a reliable, fast-working and scalable data infrastructure serving its data analytics department in particular and the entire organization.
Key Benefits
The data modernization project was a complex one with a duration of twelve months at the end of which we helped the client accomplish all their objectives. For the data analytics department in particular, as the main interested party in the project, the data modernization cloud solution:
- reduced the costs generated by the old infrastructure
- transfered the infrastructure maintenance efforts to the cloud vendor
- while keeping and even increasing the performance
At the same time, the other users consuming data benefited from transparency of data at all times.
Business and development continuity was kept by means of a rigorous planning and a good communication between our project manager and stakeholders.
