Snowflake Migration Best Practices: Lift and Shift Versus Platform Modernization

When you transform data from a legacy system to Snowflake Data Cloud, which migration strategy is best?

Oct. 31, 2023 | By Shishir Shrivastava

Businesses demand cost-effective, data-driven solutions. If you’re a CDO devoted to building and maintaining a data strategy and strengthening its AI journey, you’ve weighed the two approaches to application migration. Do you lift and shift because it’s quicker and less costly upfront? Or do you embark on a platform modernization journey to save time in the long run?

Phasing Out Your Legacy Platform

Legacy platforms serve critical business needs, but they simply can’t keep up with new applications and are generally slow or unresponsive. They are susceptible to cybersecurity risk and noncompliance flags. Not to mention, legacy platforms lack scalability, which results in the inability to accommodate business growth. As the data grows, the complexity of data grows with it, which can lead to the loss of productivity and revenue.

Before you start your Snowflake migration journey, there are a couple of key points you should consider for evaluating your data cloud strategy:

• What is your required time to market? How quickly do you want to move to Snowflake, and is that your main value driver?
• Do you know how many objects (tables, reports, data) need to be transferred to Snowflake?

Lift and Shift Versus Platform Modernization for Snowflake Migration

Lift and Shift

Lifting and shifting your data is exactly what it sounds like—moving every ounce of data from the legacy platform to the cloud. The lift and shift strategy for data migration to Snowflake offers both advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:

• If time to market is an urgent priority, your business is running fine, and you know what you’d like to migrate, then lifting and shifting your data to Snowflake is the most time-effective approach.
• You can repoint all reports, dashboards and existing workloads easily.

Cons:

• Technical debt results in higher costs in the future.
• Unnecessary and outdated data will be transferred and never used again.

Platform Modernization

Platform modernization is a multifaceted journey that takes longer than lift and shift to complete because it transforms programs, architecture and applications to improve efficiency. Platform modernization for data migration to Snowflake offers both advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:

• Platform modernization is a more intentional approach, with less work in the long run.
• You don’t take reports to Snowflake that have accumulated for decades. You know the exact data critical to your business and have peace of mind knowing what’s being used every day.
• It improves the performance scale and long-term cost aspect.

Cons:

• It is a more involved process that takes longer than lift and shift because the data migration is more intentional.
• When you choose platform modernization for Snowflake data migration, you must think through your organizational priorities as you pick and choose what moves to Snowflake.

Platform Modernization: Snowflake Migration Processes and Results

At TEKsystems, we follow a three-phase approach when it comes to platform modernization for Snowflake migration. The result? Clear communication, collaboration and customer satisfaction throughout the process.

Phase 1: Eliminate the transfer of outdated information by using a tool that indicates which reports haven’t been used in the past year so we can quickly determine the value of insights.

Phase 2: Collaborate with the customer to determine the rest of the data, which allows us to build a roadmap for the long-term transition to Snowflake.

Phase 3: Phase out the legacy tools and platform.

After the third phase is complete, customers instantly see a difference in accuracy and forecasts, which boosts their bottom line by evaluating cost inventory and predicting escalations in budget. The new reflection of data is mutually beneficial to internal leaders and day-to-day consumers.

Stay Relevant: Scale Up With Snowflake Data Cloud

When it comes to scalability, speed, agility and volume, platform modernization is the clear winner when migrating data from a legacy platform to Snowflake Data Cloud. No matter what cloud provider you’re working with, AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft, we can partner with you. Your system will process terabytes of data every day, and you’ll rest easy as the platform adds horsepower to hyperproductive business operations.