Bad news: migrating to the cloud isn’t a data architecture strategy, and it most likely (in and of itself) won’t solve the biggest points of friction, challenges, or problems your team is currently facing. Here’s why.
Cloud Migration Isn't Risk-Free
Yes, cloud storage can be cheap, but for some organizations (especially ones that are 100+ years old and have incredible amounts of historical data), not cheap enough to put every datapoint that’s ever been collected. There’s some data that’s valuable on the day it’s collected, some a week later, some three to four years later. But what about after seven years? It’s worth putting some thought around what data really needs to be in the cloud, because after all …
All Data Will Never Be in the Cloud
Most IT teams don’t consider the fact that business people plan for a world where data will pretty much never all be in one place. At Dataiku, we talk to people every week who might have 60%-80% of their data in some big data platform, but inevitably some extremely important thing — like, for example, a list of product codes — comes out of some other business process. It’s in peoples’ inboxes, it’s in XYZ SaaS tool, etc.
But It's Not All Bad News!
Cloud Migration Can Be the Start of a Valuable Journey
Let’s take a step back: imagine you have tens of little Allen keys sitting around all over your house. You know, the kind that comes with furniture and other items you need to self-assemble. After assembly, you figure you may eventually need the Allen key someday, so now, you’ve accumulated a few in the kitchen, in the closet, tucked away in a desk drawer — who knows if you even own the associated items anymore with which they originally came. In this scenario, does putting all the Allen keys in one place resolve the problem?
Well, sort of, in that next time you need one, at least you know where all of them are and potentially save marginal time in digging around in multiple locations. But you still don’t know which ones you need and which ones you can get rid of, what works with which item, and how many duplicates of the same size you’re holding onto, etc. You haven’t been able to assign meaning to each Allen key.
When it comes to cloud migration, many (if not most) people and teams think putting the data all in one bucket is the end of the journey. In our experience at Dataiku working with hundreds of multinational organizations, often with the IT teams, they rarely have thought about completing this sentence:
"We’re migrating to the cloud, and because of that, we’ll be able to …."
In other words, the value of the initiative is often an afterthought (if it’s a thought at all).
The Bottom Line
Cloud migration in and of itself doesn’t mean data is getting more meaningful or useful from a business perspective, so for it to be a strategic move with positive outcomes, there should ideally be a larger goal. In other words, cloud migration can (and should) be part of that goal, but it shouldn’t be the goal.
The fact is, there is a natural, underlying tension between IT and business and the desire to centralize or to decentralize efforts. However, technology alone can’t (and doesn’t) resolve this tension — what does resolve it is aligning business needs as closely as possible with owners of the data. That means getting domain experts to decide what the data means, who should use it, how it should be used, and more.