AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Hexaware Leverages Automation for Faster and Cost-Effective Data Warehouse Modernization to AWS
By Prasad Karkhanis, Assistant VP, Business Intelligence and Analytics – Hexaware
By Apoorv Saxena, Product Marketing Manager, Strategic Partnerships – Hexaware
By Shilpa Tyagi, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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The cloud data warehouse market is expected to reach $17.8 billion by 2028, according to KBV Research, owing to the increasing popularity and adoption of cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift. As a result, many companies are considering the migration of on-premises data warehouse systems hosted on massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances such as Oracle Exadata to Amazon Redshift.
There can be operational challenges in running an on-premises data warehouse. For example, their rigid and inflexible architecture becomes a big blocker in meeting business requirements for objectives like a simple change in a data model, which could take weeks or even months to complete and may end up costing a lot of money.
Due to their highly complex and redundant architecture, repositories of data lay in silos, isolated from other business units, leading to inconsistent and unreliable reporting. On-premises data warehouses are also not very efficient at processing large volumes of data, which leads to slow performance and cause delays in reporting.
Amazon Redshift is a column-oriented database management system that stores data in columns, making it quicker to analyze data. It lets users store data in a data lake (with raw and unstructured data) before it heads to the data warehouse, which helps users integrate new data sources at a much quicker pace.
Redshift’s built-in security features manage data encryption with ease. The platform also performs a continuous backup of data, eliminating the risk of losing data or the need to plan for backup hardware.
In this post, we will introduce Hexaware’s automated platform Amaze for Data & AI, which transforms on-premises data warehouse ecosystems to the cloud while ensuring business keeps running smoothly and uninterrupted.
Hexaware Technologies is an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller with multiple AWS Competencies, including DevOps and Migration Consulting, and a leading information and technology business process consultancy.
Simplifying the Migration Journey
Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse that leverages the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides companies with additional benefits such as easier scalability of hardware and storage, high performance due to better compute power, improved productivity, quicker business insights on data, and cost-effective storage leading to lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
While considering migration of on-premises data warehouses to Amazon Redshift, enterprises face numerous challenges like not having a planned migration strategy, not knowing what workloads to move and when, and high perceived financial investments while deciding to move.
Hexaware’s Amaze for Data & AI solves these migration challenges by helping define a business case through an automated assessment. It delivers exact migration timelines, migration budget, TCO reduction, speed of migration, and number of days for return on investment (ROI) as an outcome.
Through the Amaze for Data & AI platform, Hexaware enables enterprises to leverage automation capabilities and cloudify their data warehouse and analytics ecosystems to AWS.
Modernizing Your Data Warehouse
Hexaware provides end-to-end solutions for customers, beginning with guides that can help you get started:
Hexaware’s AWS transformation roadmap begins with the “Embracing the Cloud” phase, which includes assessing the AWS cloud readiness of the current data and analytics ecosystem. While moving to AWS, the first step is to identify how ready an enterprise is to undergo this massive transformation. The readiness is gauged at the organizational, data, IT, analytics, and data governance levels.
Hexaware has created an extensive yet simple questionnaire to produce a cloud readiness assessment framework that generates a readiness score within minutes. Responses help to generate a feasibility score that can be used to advise the customer’s leadership team on what areas need to be focused on before undertaking the AWS Cloud journey.
The architectural blueprint is defined in the “Journey to the Cloud” phase. Hexaware does this by selecting the right tools available in the AWS stack that optimize TCO, enable real-time capabilities, bring in self-service, and minimize efforts. Once the best-fit AWS services are put together as a blueprint, the task of cloud transformation begins with a chosen use case.
An incremental approach vis-à-vis a big bang approach helps to feedback the environment-specific learnings into the transformation program without any risks or disruption to the business. Hexaware’s incremental approach involves using a minimum viable product (MVP) as an important AWS adoption strategy. This acts as the right starting point because it validates the transformation approach and ensures all customizations for maximizing automation are identified and implemented.
Post-validation, Amaze for Data & AI gets customized to the environment to accelerate the rest of the transformation efforts.
In the “Living on the Cloud” phase, with Amaze for Data & AI, Hexaware offer services like greenfield data warehouse development and data observability services that monitor consumption and optimize code, workloads, and compute to ensure costs are minimized.
Hexaware provides data preparation services for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) including data engineering that reduces data preparation efforts, and pre-built cloud-native AI/ML libraries that ensure customers leverage the full benefits of the AWS Cloud. Enterprises can build highly scalable advanced analytics solutions on top of AWS on platforms like Amazon SageMaker.
Enterprises can also establish data governance policies that cater to regulatory policies and compliances while ensuring complete data integrity and protection.
Benefits of Amaze for Data & AI
The list of benefits provided by Amaze for Data & AI through this three-step journey to AWS are as follows:
- Quickly establish a strong business case for AWS Cloud adoption.
- Align data, business intelligence (BI), and analytics workloads with desired strategic outcomes.
- Map capabilities of the AWS Cloud.
- Understand the estimated timelines and budget.
- Reduced effort through automated migration.
- Automated metadata analysis of the data layer, data pipeline, and data visualization.
- Automated conversion of legacy to modern analytics ecosystem.
- Metadata-based data ingestion framework for creating new pipelines for AWS.
- Reduction in total cost of ownership.
- Reduced effort in the transformation.
Customer Success Story
A UK-based financial services enterprise had a 10+ year-old data warehouse application on SQL Server that had batch performance issues, challenges in scalability, and required significant efforts when adding new data elements. Further, licensing and overhead maintenance costs of the on-premises legacy data warehouse were high.
The enterprise was seeking a data warehouse transformation partner to address their challenges, define a migration plan, and estimate the costs. The ultimate goal was to migrate its on-premises data warehouse to a data warehouse on the cloud.
Hexaware’s Amaze for Data & AI performed an automated assessment of the existing data warehouse. This included data, data pipeline, and data visualization layers to understand the readiness of the enterprise to undergo the transformation.
Based on the assessment, Hexaware’s consultants prepared a migration plan which included the migration timeline and TCO reduction that would be achieved by replatforming the data and pipeline layers to Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue, respectively, while repointing the data visualization layer to Tableau.
Amazon Redshift provided the enterprise with easier scalability of hardware, storage and data, and higher performance owing to better compute power along with quicker data insights. This led to considerable savings in annual operational expenditure.
Hexaware’s Amaze for Data & AI provided accelerated migration by reducing migration timelines by over 50% through an automated deep discovery. The transformation efforts were reduced by over 40%, with the cost-effective transformation delivering savings of 50% during the first year by automating code migration, which resulted in a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership.
A data governance framework was established on the cloud to ensure faster change request management and data lineage.
The customer’s data warehouse that was originally built only for internal stakeholders was extended to deliver the files for external clients, thus enabling data monetization as well.
Summary
Modernizing enterprise data warehouses on Amazon Redshift is a cost and performance optimization project that enterprises can take up. Hexaware’s automated cloud replatforming platform, Amaze for Data & AI, helps reduce the time, effort, and cost to migrate to Amazon Redshift.
To start your migration journey to Amazon Redshift, contact Hexaware at awssales@hexaware.com.
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Hexaware – AWS Partner Spotlight
Hexaware is an AWS Specialization Partner and next-generation provider of IT services. Hexaware has multiple AWS Competencies, including DevOps and Migration Consulting.