by R. Ashok Kumar, on Jun 7, 2021 9:14:09 PM
Estimated reading time: 3 mins
Business platforms reach the end of life or their maintenance support expires every 5 to 10 years. Continuing with the same old platform results in technical debt. Hence switching over to a new platform environment is desirable. Nowadays, Cloud offers solutions for all business environments, where businesses use the Cloud to install their business and software applications of choice. The Cloud also offers many native solutions in a software as a service mode. However, as businesses build over-the-top intelligence and semantic layers, custom reports, data sets, and universes, they prefer to use the same platform even after migrating to Cloud. Here, some specific rules, business standards, or pillars are of immense importance during a platform migration.
The 6 pillars of platform migration
System integrators diagnose the custom-built over-the-top layers and decide the transition approach. They enable the businesses to affect the platform migration based on their previous experience in migrating custom-built environments. The strategy and approach is based on the following 6 pillars of platform migration –
Pillar 1 - Strategy Definition phase
Defining the platform migration project along with the strategy is preliminary. It enables businesses to decide on the governance model and build the RACI matrix defining the responsibilities and accountabilities for the project and the migration policies and rules. Requirement gathering, defining the admin and tenant architecture, consolidating the universes and datasets for migration, shortlisting accelerators, chalking the change management document, creating PoCs, and prioritizing sub-projects and sprints, become the close next.
Pillar 2 – Process and Technology accelerators
Using process and technology accelerators is the most important pillar of a platform migration. Use frameworks based on REST APIs, shell commands, etc., to expedite the migration. Robotic testing tools, such as TruTest, helps to test in near real-time thus allowing to SHIFT-LEFT the timelines for migration. Generating training documents in parallel with the help of tools, such as Rapidox is highly important to the migration project.
Pillar 3 – Re-design a new semantic layer
As-Is platform environments have customized, over-the-top intelligence and semantic layers that are selectively built through the lifetime of the earlier platform and may not have followed industry standards. Re-design the new semantic layer for the new environment based on the earlier layer. Design the new semantic layer for building core data entities and harness flexibility to add more data entities. Use Tabular Editor for building the new model design.
Pillar 4 – Migrate existing universes
Identify the KPIs, business rules, and universes for migration and prioritize the sub-projects and sprints. Optimize, consolidate, and centralize the migration universe and datasets. Use metadata extraction tools for creating *.xml files from the existing Universe and metadata designs to be used in the new platform. Create reproducible environments by using accelerators, such as Rapidox, TruTest, comparison utilities, etc. Perform user acceptance tests (UATs), deploy to production, and monitor the performance of the new environment till mass roll-out.
Pillar 5 – Verify and validate
Build test cases, run automated tests, and validate the environment at all nodal points.
Pillar 6 – Risk mitigation
Risks are a part of any project. They could arise in the form of the non-availability of objects, elements, or universes post-migration. At times the two environments are not synchronized post-migration. Sometimes a shift in scope occurs due to changes required mid-project or failures encountered in UAT. Working closely with system integrators throughout the entire project minimizes the risks.
The outcome of accelerator-powered platform migration
Accelerator-powered migrations improve the delivery time of the project. It accounts for secure data governance in the new platform. It simplifies the project to the nth extent possible and significantly reduces risks.
In summary
Platform migration is a tedious project if done manually. Accelerator-powered platform migrations, where the new or the To-Be environment on the Cloud closely relates to the As-Is environment offer the best and fast migration timelines. The 6 pillars of platform migration and experience of the system integrators allow the businesses to leverage the new environment over the Cloud to the best possible extent.
