Legacy systems and applications continue to plague the financial services domain with their lack of business agility, high maintenance costs, and lack of support for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics. This is a major hindrance in the modern data-driven business landscape.

A leading financial institution faced a similar challenge as they looked to modernize their existing data infrastructure and implement a strong data governance framework.

The problem

As part of its existing infrastructure, the financial institution (FI) had designed a complex ecosystem of Teradata and Hadoop-powered data warehouses – in addition to ETL solutions based on Ab-Initio and Informatica. This on-premise legacy infrastructure incurred high maintenance costs as well as created data silos. 

The presence of data silos disrupted the unified view of enterprise data – thus making it challenging to extract real-time data insights, which in turn, impacted business decisions. Data silos also presented the challenge of the “lack of a single source of truth” along with low-quality data.

Additionally, the legacy infrastructure lacked the scalability and flexibility needed to embrace technologies like AI and advanced analytics.

The Google Cloud solution

In partnership with Onix, this FI implemented the solution of migrating their legacy data assets and warehouses to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With this proposed solution, the company planned to reduce its on-premise infrastructure costs and develop a data-friendly environment for AI, analytics, and data governance.

Here’s how the Onix team implemented a successful cloud migration and modernization strategy for this client:

• Legacy assessment and planning: This involved a deep analysis of the client’s existing Teradata data warehouse aimed at understanding their current data landscape. This exercise provided comprehensive information about data lineage and metadata, both crucial for a seamless migration to the cloud.
• Code conversion and modernization: Using automation tools, this phase involved the conversion of legacy code to be compatible with GCP data workloads on Dataproc or BigQuery. The Onix team also modernized their current data model for improved performance and lesser maintenance.
• Accuracy and validation: Post-migration, the Onix team performed rigorous testing on the migrated data to ensure accuracy and a smooth transition from the previous system.
• Data consumption migration: Considering the importance of downstream data usage, Onix also identified the data consumption patterns of various applications and end-users, thus creating views with backward compatibility on GCP and BigQuery. Additionally, they seamlessly migrated this consumption to GCP and BigQuery.
• Continuous modernization: The Onix team approached data modernization as an ongoing process and not as a one-time activity. They created a customized roadmap for this client to successfully migrate and modernize other data warehouses residing on Teradata and Hadoop.
• ETL migration proof of concept: To optimize their data pipeline, Onix also performed a successful Proof of Concept (POC) to migrate their Informatica ETL processes to Microsoft Azure Datasynapse, thus demonstrating their multi-cloud expertise.
• Establishing data governance: Onix also established a data governance and validation environment on Google Cloud using BigQuery and Dataplex. They also deployed Collibra as the authoritative source for data quality metrics and rules and as an effective framework for ensuring data quality. 

Customer benefits

Following the successful implementation of Onix’s data migration and modernization initiative, the client benefited from the following outcomes:

• Significant cost reduction: A substantial reduction in operational expenses and resource costs on decommissioning legacy ETL systems and data warehouses.
• Enhanced agility and performance: Improved scalability and performance on the GCP BigQuery and Dataproc cloud platform, thus enabling faster and better data analytics and insights for their business analysts and data scientists.
• Future-proofing for AI: Implementation of a modern GCP-powered data infrastructure that enabled the client to adopt and leverage the power of Onix’s AI capabilities. This helped the client explore various use cases that significantly increased its overall efficiency and productivity. 

Conclusion

Through this client case study, Onix demonstrated its expertise in cloud technologies and data solutions. Our technology expertise has enabled many organizations to overcome the limitations of legacy systems and embrace the benefits of the cloud, thus paving the way for future innovation.

Over the years, Onix has helped companies in the financial services sector achieve success with their data modernization. Reach out to us to discuss your unique challenges.