From Bricks and Mortar to the Cloud: A Secure Migration for Construction Materials Data

Being in the construction materials industry, our client plays a vital role in supporting the housing industry and infrastructure development. Construction materials are essential for building homes, commercial properties, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects.

They had maintained their own servers and network since inception and maintaining on-premise servers and networks had become limiting, especially as businesses was growing and required more scalability, flexibility, and reliability. Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible.

The main challenge facing the company was its SQL servers, which it used to generate invoices and store design specifications, which were accessed by their customers. These servers were slow, unstable and costs were escalating due to outdated hardware or inefficient configurations. The ageing on-premise infrastructure resulted in decreased productivity and frustration among users.

Consequently, we started building out the use cases and benefits while assessing a few cloud solutions to see if they met their technical expectations.

Cloud migration presented various challenges, particularly for our client’s businesses which was transitioning from on-premise infrastructure and they wanted to minimise downtime and data loss and had concerns for performance and latency.

Cloud technologies required specialized skills that were not readily available within this business.

The business leaders acknowledged that there are multiple cloud providers in the market and were confused with their sales pitches and this led to inertia and lethargy in decision making.

Addressing these challenges required careful planning, collaboration, and expertise to ensure a smooth and successful cloud migration for our client's business. Transitioning to cloud-based data solutions offers greater scalability and flexibility compared to traditional on-premises data warehouses.

However, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for this business depended on several factors and we organised workshops for planning and better understanding their goals and drivers and assessing potential technology fit. We built out the use cases with key stakeholders, carefully mapped all dependencies and used these to demonstrate the benefits of cloud computing to the business.

Instead of focussing on capital expenses, we proposed an OpEX or operational expenses cloud model, using ‘pay as you go’ mode.

We evaluated the platform features, pricing, and support for 3 cloud vendors to determine which best aligns with the organization's needs and finalised on Snowflake Data Cloud as it met most of the use-cases and for its simplicity and ease of use. We also proposed using Snowpipes for loading into Snowflake Stage and eventually transforming this into a modelled area with Snowflake.