US business services company drives 83 percent reduction in operational expenses over a period of three years by moving on-premise data warehouse to Amazon Redshift

Client Background

Client: Business services company

Industry: Commercial & professional services

Services: Business data, Credit & risk, Sales & marketing, Analytics

Area of operation: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Greater China, India

Number of Employees: Over 4000

Challenge

The client was running a commercial enterprise data warehouse that contained aggregated data from different internal reporting systems across geographies. The data warehouse was growing at over 20 percent year over year (YoY), with higher growth expected in the future. This growth required them to keep upgrading the hardware to meet the storage and compute needs, which was expensive. Also, licensing was based on CPU cores, so adding hardware to support the growth required additional investment in licenses, further spiralling the costs.

The on-premises data warehouse environment was an extension of the transactional system. Analytical queries experienced performance issues when they were executed against large datasets and the client’s customer queries took longer time for execution, which ultimately impacted their interactive experience with dashboards. With data growing by 20 percent YoY, the query performance further degraded.

The client realized the need for a dedicated analytical environment to address the performance and scale issues for user reports. The primary need was to enable quick and accurate analytics to drive faster business decisions.

Solution

Amazon Redshift was identified as the ideal solution for setting up a new analytical reporting environment.

• Wipro used its Cloud Data Warehouse Readiness Solution (CDRS) strategy to migrate data to Amazon Redshift. Migrated 4.4 billion records to Amazon Redshift
• The Source Analyzer in CDRS created the target data model and generated the data definition language (DDL) for tables that needed to be migrated to Amazon Redshift
• The architecture included Talend (a data integration platform) running on Amazon EC2 that extracted data from various source systems for ongoing change data capture (CDC) and then loaded it to Amazon Redshift

Business Impact

The migration to Amazon Redshift provided the client an agile data warehouse infrastructure with no additional licensing costs and effort for software and hardware upgrades. The client saw immediate performance improvements at significantly lower costs. Data users were able to query and obtain reports quickly using features of Amazon Redshift.

• On an average, 8 times improvement in query execution time with six queries running in parallel
• 83 per cent reduction in operational expenses over a period of three years. The client’s license, hardware, and software costs, which attributed to approximately $750K per year,  was brought down to $133K per year
• Access to quality data 20 hours earlier than the legacy
• 5 times performance improvement while loading data to big tables
• 60% savings in migration cost using end-to-end self-service cloud migration tool CDRS
• Lowered risk by moving data with lower interdependency and non-business critical data to cloud

Quote

The legacy database to cloud transformation program enabled operational savings of 83% and 70% performance improvement for the client. With cloud as a new data platform, the client is getting access to quality data 20 hours earlier than the legacy, helping to improve customer satisfaction by generating right business insights, faster and better. Wipro brought in the right tool stack to maximize automation during implementations. They also played a good balancing act by keeping ‘the lights on’ for the existing KYC application while being 100% focused on new implementation.

Rakesh Verma, Practice Head – Data, Analytics & AI, Wipro

Read the Amazon blog for more details

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/using-amazon-redshift-for-fast-analytical-reports/