Data Modernization with AWS

By Tony Velcich
Dec 04, 2021

The amount of data being created daily is accelerating and will only grow in the future. According to Accenture, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created daily by people, edge environments, IOT devices, and machines. As more companies grapple with this data and remain anchored to their on-premises legacy data systems, their competitive edge becomes threatened. Migrating data to the cloud is just the first step: For true business value to be unlocked, data leaders need to develop modern data strategies in the cloud.

Gartner noted in a roundup of their Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2021 that “If chief data officers (CDOs) are involved in setting goals and strategies, they can increase consistent production of business value by a factor of 2.6 times.”

Moving big data to the cloud requires more than just the data migration process. Just as important are the modernized platforms, capabilities, and tools. With a modern data foundation, companies can make decisions faster and in real time, scale cloud analytics and AI, and innovate to improve the customer experience and realize business outcomes—ultimately giving companies a competitive advantage in an ever-changing business environment.

There are, however, some challenges to modernizing your data platform in the cloud. These range from insufficient budgets, unforeseen data quality issues, and lack of understanding of technology to lack of consensus among decision leaders.

Moving forward: Adopting a data modernization approach with AWS

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible and cost-effective solutions for startups and global enterprises, and the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Program allows customers to easily and confidently engage with highly specialized AWS Partners to activate data and modernize applications in the cloud.

WANdisco® LiveData Migrator™ enables enterprises to free their systems from the capital constraints of acquiring storage hardware by leveraging Amazon S3 and associated services, which accelerates the time to cloud analytics and business value. Data leaders can then take advantage of machine learning (ML)-powered cloud analytics such as Amazon EMR, Databricks, or Snowflake to gain valuable business insights. LiveData Migrator ensures that on-premises and cloud environments are kept consistent, setting the foundation for a hybrid cloud architecture.

A case in point: GoDaddy

An example that highlights the benefit of moving beyond just migration and into data modernization at scale comes from a recent experience with web-hosting company GoDaddy. Using LiveData Migrator, GoDaddy quickly migrated petabytes of data in a highly used Hadoop cluster to AWS S3 with zero downtime to business operations. By automating the migration with an eye toward modernization, the GoDaddy data science team was able to modernize its data infrastructure in AWS and rapidly deliver both valuable insights and advanced analysis to business stakeholders, all while decreasing overall infrastructure costs.

The path forward

Successful data leaders are embracing data modernization, ML, and AI in the cloud. Choosing the right tools and partners will enable your live, business-critical data to flow freely—even during petabyte-scale migration—and will prepare you to build a modern platform that can leverage this data for competitive advantage.

---