In a special guest feature just published over at insideBIGDATA, our CEO, Christian Romming, discusses ways to accelerate the process of migrating to a cloud data warehouse. Below is a summary - the full article is available here.

Cloud data warehouses (CDWs) offer advantages in speed, efficiency, and cost compared to on-premises alternatives, but the process of building and managing data pipelines to deliver analytics-ready data to consumers can be resource-intensive.

One way to accelerate the process is to find a connector for any data source. This can be done using pre-built connector tools or vendors with experience in custom sources. Connectors are important because they allow you to integrate various data sources into your CDW, which is necessary for providing data consumers with analytics-ready data.

Another way to accelerate the process is to automate the infrastructure. Moving to the cloud eliminates the need to manage physical servers, but you can still overwhelm your team with infrastructure work if you're not careful. Automating the infrastructure process can be achieved using open source orchestrators, serverless options, or fully managed pipeline tools. These options can help you schedule tasks and dependencies, provision compute clusters, optimize for cost and performance, and more, without requiring a lot of engineering time.

A third way to accelerate the process is to democratize data production. This involves giving domain experts no-code tools to directly build pipelines and prepare data for analytics, rather than relying on a central team to select and deliver data. By enabling the producers of the data to prepare it for analytics, you can ensure that the data is accurate and relevant, and you can also avoid the time-consuming process of researching each domain and data source.

To address troubleshooting time, use tools for monitoring and error alerting, or fully managed pipeline offerings that can resolve issues before they cause problems. Troubleshooting can be a significant portion of the work involved in migrating to a CDW, so it's important to have tools and processes in place to identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible.

Finally, consider using live data migration to minimize disruption and keep data up-to-date. Live data migration allows you to migrate data in real-time, which can minimize downtime and ensure that data is always current. This can be especially useful if you have a lot of data or if you need to keep your data as up-to-date as possible.

For more information on these strategies for accelerating your cloud data warehouse migration, check out the original article.