Does your Snowflake migration need a safety net?

Snowflake is a name on everyone’s lips in the data warehouse world.

Snowflake’s emergence has seen its customers manage some 250PB of data on its cloud platform – processing some 515 million workloads that run every day.

The database management firm has been valued at $85billion – on comparatively modest 12-month sales of $400million.

Snowflake’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange, in September, was an exciting milestone in the development of the business. The result is that the Snowflake database is becoming increasingly mainstream: reducing the barriers to widespread adoption at an enterprise level.

As Snowflake’s customers look to get the benefits that cloud data platforms can bring, then they will need to move away from small prototypes and fully replatform their large legacy data warehouses.

As many of them are finding, replatforming sounds easier than it turns out to be, given that many legacy systems are established, complex, and locked-in to vendor specific technologies. Planning serves to flush out the full implications of the move such as lengthy timescales, the need to redevelop ETL, the replacement of underlying technologies and the risks to continuity of service.

Unfortunately, in some cases, the migration may be seen as too risky, too expensive or too much effort to get started.

However, Snowflake offers many benefits, and the prize will go to those organisations that move early and decisively onto the new cloud data platform technologies. Over time, because of digital transformation, there will be inexorable pressure to make the decision to replatform.

If you are planning a cloud move, we have developed a migration framework to provide a safety net for planning and delivering your replatforming project.

Data warehouse migration is like playing chess. You have to think several moves ahead. An effective migration is possible, but you need to take care.Click below for a copy of our migration framework briefing paper.