This blog post was guest-written by Robin Way, Founder and CEO of Corios, and Austin Barber, VP of Enterprise Sales at Corios.
As enterprises face the rise of new technologies that require fast adaptation, the pressure to modernize their analytics infrastructure is mounting. Corios offers a comprehensive solution, allowing organizations to transition their data, workloads, and users from SAS into the Dataiku environment. Together, Corios and Dataiku provide a smooth, cloud-based, scalable solution for enterprises looking to move beyond proprietary systems.
At the heart of this transformation is the Corios Analytics Modernization Platform (AMP), which simplifies the migration process while future-proofing businesses’ analytics capabilities.
For those looking to see a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of how to migrate SAS assets into the Dataiku environment, Robin Way and Austin Barber offer deeper insights in the upcoming Product Days from Dataiku.
Modernizing Analytics for Scalability and Flexibility
The Corios platform, combined with Dataiku’s powerful data science environment, provides businesses with a seamless transition from SAS workloads to a cloud-native, open-source ecosystem. For SAS Enterprise Guide users accustomed to point-and-click functionality, Corios converts these workflows into Dataiku’s visual recipes — maintaining ease of use while eliminating the limitations of proprietary SAS code. This unlocks the flexibility required to excel in modern cloud environments like Kubernetes, Databricks, and AWS.
Real-World Example: Credit Risk Migration for a Leading U.S. Bank
Corios’ platform has already proven its effectiveness, particularly in the financial sector. For example, a major U.S. bank worked with Corios to migrate its Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) and credit risk platform from SAS to Dataiku and Databricks. Facing an end-of-life event for their legacy SAS system, the bank needed a solution that could modernize their entire credit risk process — ranging from upstream ETL, model management, and reporting — while maintaining stringent governance.
Using the Corios AMP, Corios migrated the bank’s entire credit risk system into the Dataiku platform, integrating it with Databricks as the processing engine. This migration offered several benefits, such as:
- Talent acquisition and retention: The move to Dataiku and Databricks provided access to a broader talent pool, familiar with modern, open-source technologies like Python and Spark, unlike the proprietary skills required for SAS.
- Enhanced performance and cost reduction: The bank’s analytics processes became faster and more cost-efficient, thanks to the cloud-native capabilities of Databricks and Dataiku’s easy-to-use interface.
- Governance and compliance: Dataiku’s robust governance features ensured the bank could meet regulatory requirements while simplifying complex workflows, such as credit risk forecasting, which demand precise control and orchestration.
This phased migration took about 18 months, with the CECL use case being the top priority, followed by stress testing and ongoing performance monitoring.
Technical Breakdown: Corios’ Key Tools for Migration
Corios’s Scanner conducts a comprehensive inventory of all SAS code, data, and users in an organization. It analyzes the complexity, value, and frequency of use of each SAS workload, creating a detailed roadmap for migration. The tool helps organizations filter out low-value, unused, or redundant workloads, significantly reducing the number of jobs to be migrated.
For example, a typical enterprise might start with around 20,000 SAS. Using the Scanner’s filtering criteria — such as removing jobs that haven’t been run in over 180 days or eliminating duplicates — this number can be reduced by 40% to 80%, allowing teams to focus on the most critical workflows.
The Translator
Corios’s Translator is responsible for converting SAS code into Dataiku-friendly formats. It can take SAS Enterprise Guide projects, which are heavily reliant on point-and-click operations, and convert them into visual recipes within Dataiku.
More complex SAS code that can’t be transformed into a visual recipe is converted into Dataiku code recipes, often using Python or Spark as the underlying languages. This ensures that even the most complex SAS workflows can be migrated effectively.
Additionally, the data converter handles the data migration. For instance, SAS proprietary datasets are converted into formats compatible with Databricks and AWS, using Databricks Unity Catalog to manage and organize these datasets within the Dataiku workflows.
The Academy
Migration requires not only technical migration of code and data but also upskilling of personnel. The Corios Academy offers nine online courses to train both SAS users and integration engineers on how to successfully operate within Dataiku’s environment.
Courses cover essential topics such as migrating from SAS to Python, SAS to SQL, and SAS to Spark, ensuring teams are equipped to handle open-source, cloud-based platforms. The Corios Academy is crucial in supporting SAS users who may have little experience with cloud or open-source environments.
Enhancing Governance and Efficiency With Dataiku
One of the key advantages of migrating from SAS to Dataiku is the enhanced governance and control that comes with Dataiku’s platform. Dataiku’s centralized platform ensures data integrity and compliance with industry regulations, offering a streamlined and efficient workflow.
For highly regulated industries like banking, where precise control is necessary, Dataiku’s governance features make it much easier to manage complex applications like credit risk forecasting. Furthermore, Dataiku’s intuitive interface bridges the gap between coders and non-coders, enabling broader participation in analytics projects while maintaining oversight.
A Future-Ready Analytics Environment
By moving from SAS to Dataiku, businesses are not just migrating analytic workloads — they’re adopting a future-ready analytics environment. Dataiku’s ability to seamlessly integrate with platforms like Databricks, combined with its flexible interface that supports both technical and non-technical users, makes it an ideal platform for scaling analytics across the enterprise.
The Corios AMP provides the tools and expertise to facilitate this transformation, ensuring that enterprises can successfully migrate and modernize their analytics operations.