Why your cloud migration can’t wait
When you find yourself thinking: “If only the process was faster”, you are not alone. Your whole business is thinking the same thing. From the BI and data teams, to business analysts, to decision makers waiting for the analysis, everyone wants their data and they want it now.
The catalyst for change
When looking to migrate data from an operational system such as Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), NetSuite, or SAP, you are faced with hundreds of functional modules, tens of thousands of tables, rigid data models, intricate schemas, legacy business views and scores of reports that need to be replicated in the cloud.
Without and automated way to way to integrate, combine, blend, harmonize and analyze data across multiple data silos this can become a challenging business proposition involving thousands of hours spent on consulting services, deployment, integration, data wrangling, reconciling conflicting metrics, developing reports and managing on-going maintenance.
Three reasons why migration projects are abandoned before they ever take off:
- Slow time to value — Data latency, restrictive data access policies and data loss from complex transformation models minimize the value of insights.
- Lack of agility — Business priorities are constantly in flux and traditional data warehouses and legacy business applications can’t adapt quickly to changing business needs.
- Heavy upfront cost and effort — Migration projects for data and enterprise applications to the cloud are expensive, can take months if not years, and are often obsolete before the project is finished.
Faster data. Deeper insights. Better decisions.
Every enterprise has massive amounts of data stored in a variety of sources, but often times this data is sitting idle, incurring costs without creating value. This is because combining data from your CRM with your ERP for example is a monumental data engineering undertaking, despite the fact that the combined, enriched data would yield a more accurate picture of the state of business operations. The end result of transforming the data into a business-ready format that can be consumed by downstream systems or business analysts is often a dataset made of aggregated values that you may drill into one or two levels down, but won’t have visibility to the underlying transaction-level data.
As part of your data and analytics tech stack, Incorta combines and blends data from multiple ERPs and business applications into a common environment, opening up access to 100% of your enterprise data and ending the disjointed data experience. Incrementally refreshed every few minutes, accelerating the availability of the latest data without delays. And since security parameters are inherited from the underlying source, IT teams can continue to maintain complete control over data governance without having to manage security in multiple places.
A dream come true for data consumers across the enterprise who want to freely drill in any direction, investigate anomalies and find answers to the ever-growing list of business questions on demand. It also puts an end to the tug-of-war between IT teams and developers for data access. With access to all data at a granular level, R&D teams can improve machine learning models and prototype artificial intelligence applications that expand business efficiency and automation.
Agility at scale
Yes, the speed of data acquisition and delivery is critical, but that’s only half the equation. A modern data platform architecture offers the flexibility and extensibility to openly integrate with other platforms and applications in the data stack ecosystem, automate workflows with APIs and native integrations, and out-of-the-box templates for popular data sources to jumpstart implementations.
Incorta’s open data delivery platform is purpose-built to migration of your data out of legacy ERP systems such as Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle EBS, NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce and other enterprise applications such as Workday Adaptive and BlackLine.
With built-in data applications for a variety of use cases across multiple functional areas organizations can accelerate cloud migration and speed up the development of analytics, reporting, and AI projects. Each data application offers schemas and business views that express key metrics, sample reports, visualizations, and even sample data for modeling. The result is dramatic — speeding time to value by greatly reducing the amount of work needed to give users baseline reports and KPIs, even when working with billions of rows of data.
Planning for the future
There are a multitude of benefits to migrating your business systems and data to the cloud. The ability to elastically scale infrastructure resources as you grow, the flexibility of integration with other cloud services, the reliability of nearly 100% uptime, improved IT resource management, ease of collaboration, and of course lower costs.
Incorta’s open data delivery platform powered by smart lakehouse technology enables customers, partners, and third-party developers to accelerate migration to the cloud, deliver business-ready data for consumption, and innovate new use cases and applications. Easily integrated into your existing tech stack ecosystem, Incorta takes the complexity out of data acquisition and delivery, organizations can achieve a new level of business agility, enjoy the freedom to ask any question of their data and discover fresh insights that shape better business outcomes. And they can do this at a fraction of the time and cost, regardless of data volumes or the number of data sources.
This blog is part of a four-part series demonstrating Incorta’s FAST capabilities. If you missed the first one on “Freshness,” read here. If you’d like to continue with this series, stay tuned for part 3 “Scale“.