Improved Cost Efficiency and Flexibility Through Cloud Migration on IICS

Conventional on-premises data centers have become cumbersome due to their technical drawbacks and technical debt contributors as compared to cloud based solutions. They can be very costly to operate with a lower rate of data availability. Moreover, they require frequent maintenance and upgrades caused by the high loads on the systems which result in continuous maintenance costs for organizations.

Our client was using an aged on-prem legacy system, experiencing similar disadvantages. Maintenance as well as license/infrastructure fees of the on-prem tools were too high, and the system availability was lower compared to its contemporary counterparts caused by the frequent maintenance cycles.

These drawbacks caused a decrease in our client’s productivity and impacting their profitability. Based on our client’s modernization and digitalization strategy, focusing on a cloud-first approach, we developed and implemented a cloud based approach.

The advent of new technologies often provide increased efficiencies and reduced costs, as is the case with cloud technology. Organizations are continuously gravitating to cloud solutions for these exact reasons.

Similarly, our solution for our client was to migrate the data from an on prem Informatica PowerCenter to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Platform (IICS). We executed a mass ingestion, allowing the consumption of DB2i logs by IICS. This approach was intended by Adastra, mainly because the final platform, the Google Cloud, was not compatible with the client’s aged legacy system and did not allow a direct migration to Google Cloud.

By leveraging technologies such as Informatica IDMC-IICS, DB2i, and BigQuery, our client acquired a modernized cloud platform where a subscription model can be used instead of a licensing model, maximizing efficiency and enabling flexibility in the processing power.

On-prem data center tools often come with a licensing model that requires an annual license with monthly/quarterly/annually payments. This results in inflexible and inefficient operation; to cope with potentially high data loads, organizations tend to over-spend for on-prem data centers. In many cases, organizations overestimate the processing power required resulting in less than optimized efficiencies. In addition, on-prem data centers require frequent maintenance and cause a lower system availability.

Cloud platforms allow organizations to acquire temporary processing power when needed and downgrade to initial stats after the high load processes are completed. These temporary upgrades can be executed in hours whereas upgrading on-prem data centers can take weeks and naturally cannot be returned which makes it a permanent investment.

Key benefits derived from the cloud migration are:

• Increased flexibility and timeliness of system upgrades
• Annual TCO (total cost of ownership) reduction of 20%
• Simplification of licensing model to subscription based service model
• Increased system availability of 99.9%

Our client is a leading discount mass merchandiser retailer in Canada with operations in many provinces across 260+ locations. By implementing this solution, our client is quickly becoming a leader through their use of data and analytics through cloud solutions.