Traferium: The Key to Successfully Migrating Data to the Cloud

by Seema Gupta | Director, Database Solutions

“Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.” — Clive Humby & Michael Palmer

In the global economy, controlling data is crucial and the only way to manage today’s data is in the cloud.

However, many enterprises today continue to struggle to migrate their data to the cloud. Businesses regularly discover they don’t have the skilled resources needed to get that old platform data into the cloud. Migration becomes costly, time-consuming, and often abandoned.

What should you do for a successful migration project?

As a data expert with deep experience in cloud migrations, I have to recommend the absolute necessity of investing in a high-quality, end-to-end migration tool, like Traferium, that saves money over time and is a key to success.

Why invest in a premium end-to-end migration product?

An End-to-End Migration Tool Migrates Data AND translates a Program. You need both.

Data migration, along with the translation of the program written in one platform to another platform, is very challenging, demanding, and time-consuming, and requires a lot of skilled human resources to complete manually. Manual data migration comprises steps like extracting data from the old system, loading data to the new system, and verifying to ensure that data is migrated accurately. Translation of programs requires dual-skilled human resources to complete the conversion of code from one platform to another, which is often the most time-consuming and most important aspect of data migration projects.

A premium data migration product automates data migration and translation of programs. For example, an end-to-end migration tool like Traferium has been designed to automate the tedious data migration, code conversion, and data verification to ensure data is migrated accurately to the cloud data platform. Traferium automates the data migration from the cloud or on-premises setups. More than that, Traferium automatically converts Oracle Pl/SQL stored procedures and functions to Snowflake JavaScript, which is the most complex part of the migration from Oracle to Snowflake.

Premium Products are Key to Success: You get What you Pay For.

Many free data migration tools pop up in the market to attract organizations to use vendor services to migrate data. A free tool may be tempting, but I want to create an awareness that most of the free tools do not provide end-to-end migration capabilities which always end up costing a lot more money or lead to failed migration projects.

According to a development operations director at a healthcare firm, “With the use of the free tool, the migration effort took 50% less time but we had to hire a big team for data verification and code conversion. This impacts our timelines and creates a risk for successful project completion.” That equates to some cost savings in terms of data migration, but now they are spending time and money on the data verification and code conversion which could have been saved by Investing in a premium tool beforehand. That’s what I like about Traferium — all these tasks are automated.

Time and Cost Savings with a Migration Tool. Experience Matters.

In my experience, enterprises get stuck in the initial cost of the migration tool and fail to see the bigger picture.

Recent feedback from a manual migration team of 4 Subject Matter Experts/Developers revealed that the manual migration of 20 stored procedures and functions written in PL/SQL to Snowflake javascript would take 9 months for the code conversion alone. Additionally, they had to work on writing the scripts for schema mapping and data migration which added a couple of months to the manual migration effort total duration of the migration project was 12 months.

For the same project, Traferium would take 3 months. How’s that possible? Manual migration involves onboarding and training time, creation of scripts for manual migration, writing code for the conversion of PL/SQL to Snowflake JavaScript, and data validation. Traferium automates the discovery, schema mapping, data migration, job creation, reporting, code conversion, and many other steps which saves countless hours as compared to manual migration.

Reducing the duration of the project is only one of the ways that Traferium provides ROI. Other ROI factors include:

• 65% Reduction in Level of Effort in code conversion compared to manual migration
• 3X faster migration

As seen in the graphic below, there are several factors that add cost to a migration project. However, it shows how simply reducing the duration of a migration project significantly affects those costs. The image doesn’t capture all the different types of project costs that contribute to the total cost of operation (TCO) of a migration project.

Technical Support from Subject Matter Expert Team

Databases cannot be treated as a commodity, so you need to have a high-quality innovative product backed up by immediately accessible experts who know the technology because they built it. That way, any questions, problems, or new needs can be addressed quickly. A premium product like Traferium is backed up by experts in RDBMSs including Oracle and Cloud platform databases including Snowflake.

You may ask, how does that help? If you work with a specialist cloud database/tool provider, you can expect support for:

• Discovery and Planning: If you are making significant architectural changes, you will need expert advice on areas such as managing differences between two database platforms and optimizing performance in the cloud compared to on-premises.
• Design: A database expert can help you improve the database design during migration to minimize unexpected discrepancies and avoid costly design mistakes.
• Rapid Response: If you are using open-source migration tools in a mission-critical environment, you cannot afford to wait for the open-source community to address an issue. Having an expert partner like the Traferium team that is invested in the software will make it easier to manage any migration issues for mission-critical systems.
• Strategic Value: The right database consultant that understands your business will have the resources to drive a customer-focused roadmap. This will help you maximize the strategic value of your database on a new platform.

Why Traferium?

Traferium’s value comes from the fact that it guarantees the highest levels of success and customer satisfaction. With Traferium, enterprises can migrate to the cloud with reduced time and risk of the project while delivering more data accuracy. All these elements provide the success in increasing ROI on a new storage platform. Generally, to get the most mileage out of “refined oil,” it is important that organizations are equipped with the data migration tools they need to succeed. Traferium does the job.

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