The client is among the world’s leading companies in healthcare.
We have worked together for a long time, supporting the organization with a SAS analytics platform. This platform was previously hosted in an on-premise environment in a data center in Germany. Different kinds of projects were lead there, but over the years the platform became complex to manage (8000 users, 1500 reports, a lot of data integration jobs, connections to other databases, etc) and on the other hand the data center had a lack of flexibility. Therefore, we offered our experience to advise the client on a better approach to move the whole platform from an on-premise environment to a cloud environment.
Key challenges
The company worked on more than 100 different projects and was used to on-premise environment. The first idea was to carry out a 1-to-1 migration in an eight-month timeline. We soon found out that simply replicating the architecture in the cloud was impossible and we had to change our approach.
The main challenge was to reinvent and reorganise the user concept in a limited time frame. Our engineers wanted to do housekeeping of projects, users and reports, and restructure the entire environment to get more detailed and secure user access rights (up to 10k users).
Our approach
The first phase began with building the new architecture in the cloud. Our team started by setting up the cloud infrastructure: SAS environment, data bases, user concept, etc.
Secondly, they interviewed every of the project stakeholders to make sure that the project requirements would be met in terms of performance, third-party connections and dependencies once in the new environment. They re-evaluated all existing processes (system access, permissions granting, new projects set up) and optimized them for the cloud.
Then, the engineers split the single on-premise environment into two new Azure environments: Lab and Prod, and included a deployment process to go from the first one to the second. For modernization, in addition to the SAS 9.4 architecture, the new cloud-native, web-based SAS Viya architecture was introduced.
This architectural change allowed for easier scalability, increased modularity and performance thanks to its in-memory data management property.
Benefits
This cloud-native solution allowed our customer to:
- Gain flexibility (mainly for the users)
- Scale up more easily
- Get broader and faster access to other options in terms of technologies and cloud services
- Iterate on changes faster
- Save money on operations by shifting to a self-prodiving environment
Technologies & Partners
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