Companies that have had legacy data warehouse, data marts, and reporting technologies for last 10 to 20 years are looking to modernize them, especially to a cloud equivalent. For e.g., many firms are migrating from on-premises data warehouses like Teradata to its cloud data warehouses equivalents like Snowflake. However, such transition is sure to impact the business users in many ways: applications not being available due to downtime during the migration, training on the new analytics technologies, and new ways to search, find, and use the data in the new system. Such disruption can cause lost revenue, degradation in employee productivity, and decreased customer satisfaction.

Is it possible to minimize or eliminate the business disruption? There might impact to the marketing/sales reports that need to be run weekly, regulatory compliance statements that need to be filed quarterly, and customer assistance that need to be provided in real-time by call center representatives. So, how can these critical business operations continue unimpeded while the IT is switching to the new technologies?

 This panel of experts, based on their experience, will discuss the best practices to minimizing business disruption. Expect them to provide insights to these critical questions:

• How did they handle it in their current/past companies?
• Is there an abstraction layer, like a logical data fabric or data virtualization, that will insulate the IT modernization from the business operations?
• What are the best approaches to migration – start with data warehouse and then proceed to the reporting applications?
• How long do these projects take? Is there a way to accelerate them?
• What are the pitfalls to avoid (lessons learned from past efforts)?
• How do you handle data governance, security, and literacy during the transition?
• How do you measure the ROI of the project post completion?
• What about the future? Will there be a migration from one cloud data warehouse to another (necessitated by cost overrun, performance degradation, etc.)?