Get Expert Advice on Transitioning to the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud by Jason Bullen and Scott Forrest, Agile Solutions.
If your data and workloads are currently on-premises, you may be thinking about moving to the cloud to take advantage of its increased agility, scalability and productivity, while lowering risks and costs. But you may also wonder, “What’s the best way to get there?” Have no fear. We at Agile Solutions are here to answer some common questions about the journey to cloud modernization. In this post, we share how you can leverage your existing integrations and quickly and cost-effectively migrate from PowerCenter to the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC).
Q: Our PowerCenter platform is deeply embedded in our organization. How does Informatica IDMC compare?
You’ve trusted Informatica PowerCenter for mission-critical data integration needs. As you modernize to the cloud, you want to leverage your investments in on-premises data integration tools while reducing migration costs and risks. Informatica offers you a market-leading and comprehensive Cloud Data Warehouse Modernization Solution for PowerCenter that supports you through your journey from PowerCenter to a cloud-native data management platform that is optimized for your cloud data warehouse. IDMC, powered by AI, is the industry’s first, most comprehensive, cloud-native data management platform that enables end-to-end data management. IDMC is dedicated to managing data of any type, pattern, complexity or workload across any location, any cloud – all on a single platform. Whether you’re driving next-gen analytics, delivering perfectly timed customer experiences or ensuring governance and privacy, you can always know your data is accurate, your insights are actionable and your possibilities are limitless.
Q: What are the advantages of fast-tracking modernization to the cloud?
Agile Solutions works closely with Informatica to help PowerCenter customers accelerate their cloud modernization initiative. IDMC delivers all the data management capabilities you need to address any of digital business needs and to ensure long-term return on your IT investment. Built on a scalable, microservices architecture that simplifies and accelerates deployment, IDMC offers a modern user experience that makes extensive use of AI and data analytics to automate and scale all data management activities.
With IDMC, you will find all the functionality of your PowerCenter platform — and much more. In addition, the Cloud Data Warehouse Modernization Solution for PowerCenter includes financial incentives that are tailored to meet your needs as you transition to the expanded capabilities of the cloud. Subscription credits offset your maintenance costs, while ongoing support from experts helps de-risk your migration.
Informatica is the industry-recognized leader in cloud data integration and data management. Gartner® named Informatica a Leader in four Magic Quadrant™ Reports. Informatica innovation has been recognized as a Customers’ Choice for the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’: Data Integration Tools. Informatica are the only data integration vendor to receive this honor four consecutive times. They have also been recognized by J.D. Power for delivering an outstanding customer service experience. And, Informatica was just named to Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2022.[1]
Q: What extra features will I benefit from in IDMC?
IDMC delivers all the key data integration capabilities that are part of PowerCenter.
IDMC helps organizations deliver on their digital-first initiatives and build a competitive edge with these critical attributes:
- Gain elastic scale to meet accelerating business demands: IDMC is microservices-based and API-driven, scaling all enterprise workloads with elastic and serverless processing to further the democratization of data and empower business users with data-led insights.
- Accelerate time to insights with AI-powered, metadata-driven intelligence: Informatica’s AI-powered metadata engine, CLAIRE™, is the core of IDMC and enables customers with AI and ML capabilities to derive insights from troves of data in minutes instead of months.
- Access and share data on any cloud or platform: IDMC runs all workloads at enterprise-scale in the cloud and currently processes over 22 trillion transactions each month, empowering organizations to connect, access, consume and govern data wherever it flows — the cloud, cloud-to-on-premises environments, or on-premises-to-on-premises environments.
- Connect and automate data with low-code, no-code cloud data management: IDMC maximizes agility and collaboration with a low-code or no-code experience, allowing you to respond to dynamic business requirements and changes in real time, without the overhead of developing and maintaining code.
- Protect and consume data securely: IDMC offers some of the highest industry data security standards and governance to define and enforce regulatory and privacy policies that ensure appropriate teams can quickly access and understand data and other artifacts such as AI models and pipelines.
- Freedom to choose any cloud services at any time: Informatica’s new pricing model, Informatica Processing Unit (IPU), lets you consume services across IDMC based on the amount of capacity you need at any time for any service and from any source as your requirements change.
With IDMC, you can leverage the industry’s leading cloud-native data management solution, reduce costs with financial incentives, accelerate the migration with automated conversion capabilities and de-risk migration.
Q: Will the migration process cause any disruption to my team?
Our expert team is here to guide you and ensure that you adhere to migration best practices every step of the way. As we work at the back end, there should be no disruption or gap in services at the front end. PowerCenter will stay up and running until you’re ready to fully transition. A typical migration is broken down into three phases — Preparation, Migration and Deployment — which means there is no cause to worry about an overnight switch.
The Preparation phase focuses on setting up and configuring the new target IDMC environment (assuming you don’t already have one) and planning the migration itself. We’ll define and prioritize PowerCenter folders to make sure we target the most important ones first and work our way from there.
The Migration phase consists of assessing PowerCenter logic in those prioritized lists, then migrating it and checking it for validation and completeness. In this phase, there are elements of both automation and manual conversion.
Finally, during Deployment, we engineer supporting components of existing PowerCenter integration and then implement the required scheduling and orchestration, before pushing the migrated components into production. All of this is done to focus on the most important migrations first and keep your PowerCenter running in parallel.
Q: There’s a complex ecosystem built around my PowerCenter integrations. I don’t want to lose them and have to start from scratch. What can I do?
You don’t need to abandon your PowerCenter assets, processes or institutional knowledge when you move to the cloud. Informatica’s intelligent Migration Factory is a managed service that ensures automated, cost efficient, risk-free conversion of PowerCenter mappings and workflows to the IDMC equivalent. It encompasses all the people, processes and tools that help you plan, execute and support workload migrations.
As an Informatica Migration partner, we will support you as part of the overall migration process, making sure those manual and automated conversions are carried out without a hitch. Once your integrations have been set up in IDMC and they’ve been optimized, tested and approved, we begin the gradual transition to ensure a completely smooth cloud modernization experience.
Q: How much will this cost? Having PowerCenter and IDMC running in tandem sounds expensive.
If Informatica PowerCenter has powered your on-premises data management, you don’t have to start from scratch. The IDMC pricing model is calculated by usage, which is fairly standard for cloud platforms. Simple consumption-based pricing enables you to start where you need and easily add or switch between capabilities as your requirements change over time. You will pay for a certain amount of Informatica Processing Units (IPUs), which are a measure of data throughput. IPUs act like reserved capacity, so you can pay for a small number during the early stages of migration. As more of your integrations transition to the cloud, you can scale up the number of IPUs as you scale down your PowerCenter usage, so the two costs effectively balance themselves out.
Next Steps
Agile Solutions is here to help at every stage of migration. Contact our team of Informatica experts, who can answer any further questions you might have and get your migration off the ground quickly, smoothly and without disruption. You can also watch this three-part TechTalk webinar series on the PowerCenter to cloud modernization program.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90724396/most-innovative-companies-enterprise-2022