Project snapshot
In just two months, Intellias cloud engineers and architects designed, planned, and deployed cloud infrastructure to unlock Microsoft Azure’s advanced data warehousing capabilities. With a team of three, we helped our client achieve next-level performance of their data management resources and enhance data accessibility.
Our client is a European B2B provider of specialized medical and beauty products. Established more than 50 years ago, the company has grown to become a vendor of products and services for thousands of customers, managing 2,000+ orders daily. The retail business handles large volumes of diverse data coming from its vast network of subsidiaries and partners.
Business challenge
The client faced issues in gathering and consolidating data received from multiple branches and subsidiaries operating different hardware and software platforms. Existing on-premises infrastructure could not ensure effective unification of data and its preprocessing for further use in generating business insights.
The non-cohesive data processing system resulted in suboptimal analytics and a lack of strategic decision-making, causing issues in other areas such as marketing and inventory management. With fragmented data flows, the company could not derive insights for personalized campaigns, which led to reduced customer engagement and loyalty. At the same time, the legacy system was difficult to maintain and support.
Solution delivered
Our client’s on-premises infrastructure was built using Microsoft components; therefore, the logical solution was to choose Microsoft Azure as the cloud service for hosting migrated resources. This strategy was selected to preserve the client’s infrastructure and minimize the need for reconfiguration.
Leveraging our expertise in the design and implementation of Microsoft Azure cloud solutions, we built an actionable strategy for migrating the client’s infrastructure to the Azure cloud. To ensure continuous operation of the client’s environment, we used the lift and shift approach for moving on-premises resources to the cloud. With lift and shift, we enhanced project predictability, assured project completion within the planned time frame, and reduced the probability of errors.
To improve productivity of the client’s database and ensure effective data ingestion and availability, we migrated five on-premises databases with a total data volume of approximately 1 TB from Microsoft SQL Server to an Azure SQL Managed Instance. To accelerate the migration process, we used the lift and shift approach enabled by the Microsoft Azure platform for on-premises SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) solutions.
Data integrations enabled by SSIS were migrated to Azure SSIS Runtime, taking advantage of Azure Data Factory as the orchestration service. In total, we migrated 55 ETL pipelines to the cloud.
In the new configuration, the retail business now benefits from using consolidated cloud storage for multiple data files received from diverse sources. Preprocessed data is transformed into actionable business intelligence by Microsoft Power BI, an AI-assisted platform that generates insights and represents them as rich visualizations.
Business outcomes
Migrating data warehousing infrastructure to the cloud unlocked new data management opportunities for our client. In addition to the flexibility, scalability, and high performance that are signature characteristics of Microsoft Azure cloud environments, the client noted overall improvements in enterprise data flows:
- Higher operational efficiency as a result of improved data availability and accessibility and high responsiveness of cloud storage solutions
- Accelerated reporting achieved by improving data infrastructure throughput and reducing latency
- Flexible resource provisioning enabled by dynamic scalability of cloud services, allowing the company to use only the capacity required at a particular moment
- Infrastructure cost optimization ensured by the cloud provider’s pay-as-you-go pricing model
- Simplified support and maintenance through clear infrastructure management enabled by Microsoft Azure cloud components
- Easier implementation of new features based on effective component integrations and smooth connectivity
- Low migration risk ensured by the lift and shift approach, with minimal changes to the original configuration
- System stability as a result of high cloud infrastructure performance guaranteed by Microsoft Azure cloud services