Migrating your customer data infrastructure to Snowflake

Snowflake offers unprecedented power for customer marketing and analytics use cases. Its separation of processing and data storage gives scale and accessibility unlike any other solution. The key benefit for customer marketing and customer use cases is that all data users can work from one up to date source of truth.

Migration to cloud data infrastructure is already on the agenda for many CDOs, CIOs and CMOs. With a potentially large cost for migration, and the risk inherent in moving platform, there are planning decisions to make.

Firstly, there are many different types of cloud migration, and you need to pick which one suits the needs of your business.

Broadly these migration options fall into:

• Lift and shift cloud migration – exact replica of previous customer platform in a new data cloud for increased resilience and lower cost of ownership
• Optimise and migrate route – largely replicating a legacy customer database to the cloud but taking the time optimise key components of your data infrastructure to take advantage of Snowflake’s features
• Migrating through a full rebuild – creating an entirely new data infrastructure within Snowflake to give optimum performance

At CACI we have experience of the pros and cons of each approach and can advise brands on how to get the most from a Snowflake and cloud migration. For instance a full rebuild approach is going to be more timely to complete but will offer greater benefits. In other cases the choice to migrate and optimise will offer huge performance enhancement to critical data needs whilst avoiding the larger budgets.

Regardless of route selected there are key stages in successfully completing a migration of customer data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud. At CACI we’re helping clients along this journey to minimise risk, accelerate benefits and ensure that the needs of marketing are met:

1. Legacy audit – all organisations will have a pre-existing set of data sources and integration tools that need to be audited in preparation for migration
2. Identity and quality assessment – reviewing customer data quality to ensure individuals are clearly identified and that data quality is a priority
3. Impact preparation – preparing for the impact of migration to Snowflake and communicating this within the organisation
4. Use case execution – moving to Snowflake will enable greater applications of data and more users having access to data. We help you plan for that to ensure that you reap the benefits
5. End-to-end planning – when making a change of this scale you need to ensure that all functional and technical processes are covered including reporting using the new data.
6. Operating model and enablement – ensuring teams across IT, product and marketing are able to fully use the capabilities of the new platform
7. Benefit assessment – post migration, retrospectively ensuring that the migration has achieved its objectives

To hear more about how CACI migrated the RAC from legacy data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud, you can watch Ian Ruffle, CRM Capability Manager at RAC, and Jenny Cann of CACI speaking at our recent event.

For more on CACI and Snowflake you can read these blog posts

• CACI and Snowflake’s Partnership
• Snowflake for the CMO
• Building a Customer Personalisation Platform in Snowflake