Migrating to a cloud solution can be very similar to moving to an upgraded apartment:

With a modern kitchen, a fireplace, a large living room, and maybe even a fancy lobby with a doorman, it feels right. You are so excited after signing your new lease, but after all the excitement wears off, the headache of the packing process immediately strikes.

Yes, you can take the easy and expensive route and hire someone to pack, move, and unpack everything for you. But deep down you know –  now you have the opportunity to clean your home, to get rid of all the things you don’t need, like those clothes and shoes you haven’t worn for years (and most likely won’t ever), all the junk mail, delivery menus, old bills you saved for later, and all those broken electronic devices you won’t ever fix because, let’s be frank, they are not worth your time.

When you decide to digitalize your organization or migrate to a new cloud provider, the same applies to Data & Analytics. You can take the simple and fast path and just copy all of your legacy processes and assets to your new environment – but you know it will get back at you. The alternative is to clean the mess and start off with a clean slate. 

It’s no secret that this process is hard for any business, it takes time and great effort, and creates risks in many aspects. But, it’s also an excellent opportunity for a thorough house cleaning –  

• Do you really want to drag all of the temp or test tables?
• Or those tables that no one knows about their existence but still take so much of your compute resources to create, clean, and transform?
  
• How about those views that contain 100s of rows of codes and no one even tries to understand what they are good for?
• Do you really need 37 “Account” tables spreading around your data stack?
  Should your analysts really need to wonder which “Start Date” field they should use out of the dozens they found in order to calculate your median LTV? 
  
  

It’s for these situations and more where tools like illumex come into play. With illumex you can:

• Map the usage of your database, what’s in use, by whom, when, and how. 
• Learn how tables and columns were created, and examine how a change in one of them can impact its downstream entities.
• Examine how your BI solution consumes its data, and whether it can become more efficient, and consolidate dashboards and widgets.
• Surface hidden aliases that provide new business meaning.
• Highlight unused data objects, and other things you wouldn’t want to take with you to your new fancy home in the cloud.
• Remove conflicts and duplications that can cut the bill and the tech debt which, the removal of the clutter makes you faster and more precise in using the things you decided to keep at this new home of yours.
  
  

Migrating to a new cloud solution is never easy. But it also presents a great opportunity for cleaning up your Data & Analytics stack – making it more efficient and easier to use for Data practitioners, reducing the risks, and even applying cost reduction.

New cloud, bright new start, clean new home.