Accelerate Modernization on AWS with Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio

By Govind Mohan, Associate Director – Cognizant
By Deepak Singh, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Cognizant

As data sources are becoming increasingly varied and data volume increases multifold, traditional data platforms can prevent organizations from analyzing data at scale and turning that information into tangible business insights.

However, the modernization journey can be challenging due to complexity of legacy technologies used, dependence on specialized skills, volume of data, and processes to be migrated—all resulting in extended time to value for customers.

Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio streamlines the modernization journey with a suite of pre-built accelerators that can simplify and speed up every stage of migration, including discovery, extract, transform, and load (ETL), business intelligence (BI) reports migration, and validation.

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with several AWS Competencies, including Migration Consulting and Mainframe Modernization. With its industry-based, consultative approach, Cognizant helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

In this post, we describe how Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio can help customers move legacy applications and data to the AWS Cloud quickly and effectively. We’ll also describe the main components of the studio and the functions and benefits they offer.

Key Components

Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio comprises six pre-built accelerators that support multiple data and application migration paths.

Assessment Studio

A metadata-based search, analysis, and discovery solution that enables organizations to understand the relationships and interdependencies between data entities to facilitate building an optimized migration strategy.

BI Harmony

BI Harmony helps customers refine their business intelligence (BI) migration strategy by automating BI report rationalization before migrating. It automatically connects to various BI tools, extracts report and database-level metadata information, and generates rationalization recommendations containing redundant, duplicates, subsets, superset, and overlay reports across BI reports.

Enterprise Data Migrator

Enterprise Data Migrator (EDM) is a data migration accelerator with support for over 20 data migration patterns. It helps customers fast-track their on-premises data warehouse migration to the cloud. EDM provides close to 80% automation for migrating data and schema from most common legacy data appliances, warehouses, and mainframe systems to the cloud.

ETL and Script Migrator

Migration Studio also includes ETL remediator and convertor tools that help automate remediation and convert ETL jobs from one technology to another. There’s also a script migrator that helps convert SQL-based procedures for cloud adoption.

Data Validation Studio

Data Validation Studio (DVS) connects to a variety of data sources (both on-premises and on the cloud) and performs seamless data reconciliation. It supports execution of multiple test cases in parallel, and generates detailed test logs with field-level validation reports and mismatch support for real-time test execution monitoring. DVS helps deliver 40-60% automation in quality assurance testing.

BI Factory

A tool that enables seamless conversion of business intelligence model and report metadata from legacy tools to target platforms. Model and report metadata information from the existing BI platform is automatically parsed to generate new target BI platform metadata and reports, resulting in significant effort savings during BI reports migration.

Benefits of Using Migration Studio Accelerators

Key benefits of using these accelerators as part of a customer’s cloud migration journey include:

• Cost efficiency: Reduce overall migration effort by as much as 50% by deploying automation at every stage of the migration lifecycle.
• Faster time to value: Reduce modernization timelines and time to market by accelerating the most common aspects of cloud migration.
• Completeness: A one-stop-shop solution for all data and process migration needs, with support for a wide variety of application/data migration and modernization patterns.
• Improved customer experience: Achieve data and process migration goals seamlessly with minimal business disruptions.

Solution Approach and Architecture

Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio automates and orchestrates manual processes involved in a customer’s cloud migration journey. It is possible to customize each of these steps to meet specific requirements:

• Comprehensive analysis and assessment of the existing on-premises landscape.
• Migration of data and process from a legacy platform to the cloud.
• Validating data and process migration.
• Converting BI model and report metadata.

These accelerators come with an intuitive user interface (UI). Users leverage these accelerators by configuring processes and providing details, such as source and target platform, connection details, and source code extract.

User inputs, such as connection details, are stored in the internal metadata repository, and automatically manages the execution of the processes and creates the required output.

These accelerators also support continuous monitoring of overall progress. If any failures, errors, or operational issues are detected, stakeholders are notified appropriately.

Under the hood, Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio leverages many native AWS services:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Glue for storage and metadata management
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EMR, AWS Step Functions, and AWS Lambda for processing and orchestration.
• Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS IAM Identify Center for monitoring and security.
• Amazon Redshift integration helps automate migration of data and process from legacy on premise system to Redshift.

Figure 1 – Migration Studio architecture.

Leveraging Migration Studio During Migration

Phase 1: Discover and Design

Before embarking on a cloud migration journey, it’s critical for customers to have a detailed understanding of the current on-premises technology landscape and data volume.

Each cloud migration project is preceded by an assessment phase in which a comprehensive analysis of the customer’s technology landscape, data sources, applications, and end-user reports is performed.

Assessment Studio and BI Harmony are the accelerators leveraged in this phase for the following activities:

• Identify the data sources, data volume, complexity, and constraints; list dependencies between data sources by analyzing the ETL code used to populate these data sources.
• Perform a redundancy assessment by identifying unused and duplicate BI reports and data sources; identify areas of improvement and finalize the scope for cloud migration.

Figure 2 – Dashboard showing database utilization and storage utilization.

• Work closely with the customer to define the target state architecture, cutover plan, one-time and incremental data migration strategy, application, and BI report migration/remediation plan.
• Publish final migration road map along with dependencies, deliverables, and detailed migration sprint and cutover plans.

Figure 3 – Sample output report from BI Harmony.

Phase 2: Build and Test

Leverage Enterprise Data Migrator (EDM) for both historical and incremental data migration from the on-premises source to the target cloud databases.

Select the tables or databases to be migrated using the UI and execute multiple migration jobs in parallel. EDM automatically creates the target table based on the source metadata and copies the data from source to target.

View data migration progress in real time using the monitoring screen (as shown in Figure 4). Users can also reference a validation report to reconcile the data migrated with the source.

Figure 4 – Monitor screen showing progress of data migration from source to target cloud database.

The ETL remediator and convertor tool helps convert and remediate on-premises ETL workload to the target ETL technology on the cloud.

Script Migrator automates conversion of SQL scripts and procedures to support the target cloud format. Users can upload the source SQL scripts or procedures to Script Migrator and generate an output version compatible with the target cloud technology.

Figure 5 – Console shows detailed results during conversion.

BI Factory is used to seamlessly migrate the business intelligence model and reports to new target BI platform automatically based on the source BI metadata.

Data Validation Studio performs extensive parallel testing of data and applications across multiple environments to validate the results and performance benchmarks, helping reduce QA effort by 40-60%.

Figure 6 – Data Validation Studio shows a test summary and component details.

Phase 3: Deploy and Monitor

Deploy the migration solution and perform final cutover to the cloud, support user acceptance testing, and business sign-off.

Enable continuous feedback mechanism to help fine tune the solution, and transition to application support team for future maintenance and support.

Case Study: Migration Studio Proposed Implementation

A large quick-serve restaurant chain had more than 30 years of business data stored in a legacy system that had to be retired.

The customer wanted to archive the data on AWS for legal and compliance reasons, as well as for future reference and analysis.

The customer leveraged Cognizant Data Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio to:

• Automate the migration of data to Amazon S3.
• Build the data layer on S3 as per the data classification, source application name, and source data type.
• Create Amazon Athena databases and tables based on source metadata.
• Enable information lifecycle management on S3 for archived data to save on storage costs.
• Enable BI reporting of archived data from Amazon Athena.

The customer also leveraged Data Validation Studio to perform automated data validation between legacy systems and Amazon Athena.

AWS IAM Identity Center-based identity and access management (IAM) roles were created for accessing the archived data. Custom policies were attached to these roles, which replicated the access on legacy systems. Business users were granted access to these roles which enabled them to access archived data via Amazon Athena.

As part of this project, the customer was able to migrate all legacy data to AWS and retire the legacy application as planned.

Key highlights from this engagement:

• Migration of more than ~2.5 TB data from legacy platform to AWS.
• Automated data extraction of 15,000+ objects from a legacy platform to AWS.
• Helped the customer save millions of dollars in licensing fees.
• 80% automated data offload using Enterprise Data Migrator.
• Automated quality assurance testing using Data Validation Studio.

Conclusion

Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit-Migration Studio helps clients accelerate cloud migration journeys with pre-built accelerators that simplify and automate every stage of cloud migration, resulting in faster time to market and reduced costs of implementation.

Migration Studio offers accelerators for every stage of customers’ cloud migration journey:

• Assessment Studio identifies the current technical landscape and complexities.
• BI Harmony helps perform BI report rationalization.
• Enterprise Data Migration automates data migration.
• Script Migrator and Tool Convertor convert the SQL and ETL code to versions compatible with the target cloud.
• Data Validation Studio validates data and process migration output between legacy and cloud.

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Cognizant – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that transforms customers’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era by helping organizations envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

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