50% Cut in TCO
6 Months Rapid Migration
~1 PB of Data Migrated
1500 Reports
60 Dashboards
90% Faster Data Processing
Our data modernization and cloud migration expertise helped one of the world’s largest data bureaus accelerate a PetaByte-scale data migration from a cloud environment to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), delivering a 50% reduction in total ownership costs. We modernized the full data lifecycle with new ETL pipelines, analytics, and dashboards, optimized data processing, and delivered a future-ready, cloud-native, cost-efficient, and high-performance data infrastructure without disrupting ongoing operations in just 6 months. This helped our customer position critical data for seamless integration with the enterprise-wide data platform.
The Customer
Our customer is one of the world’s largest data bureaus specializing in credit reporting, risk management, and identity verification, serving financial institutions, insurers, retailers, and healthcare providers. The company launched a data unification strategy to modernize its technology infrastructure, improve speed to market, and drive competitive advantage while enhancing security and compliance, and bringing added value to its consumers.
The Goal
The customer sought Softility’s data transformation expertise to exit an expensive cloud and reduce costs by migrating approximately 1 PetaByte of data and consolidating operations in their existing GCP environment. Our customer wanted a seamless migration to:
- Eliminate data fragmentation and unify data exchange across platforms
- Improve and optimize infrastructure utilization through highly configurable technology
- Enhance scalability, reusability, and cost efficiency while reducing technology sprawl
- Ensure compliance with strict security and regulatory frameworks
- Ensure a future-proof data environment with data automation and AI-readiness
The Challenges
- High Operational Costs: The business unit’s data was located in a legacy cloud environment and incurred high maintenance, security, and infrastructure costs.
- Diverse Technology Stack: Migrating mission-critical data across multiple development, production, and databases required the orchestration of advanced data modernization tools and data technology stacks.
- The existing ETL logic in the cloud facility had to be re-imagined and re-architected using GCP-native services.
- Processing bottlenecks due to file formats and archival were impacting performance.
- The entire Looker ecosystem, including thousands of reports and dashboards, required reconfiguration, optimization, testing, and release to point to GCP-hosted data.
- Alignment with Unified Data Platform: The migration was a foundational step to prepare for integration with a strategic enterprise-wide data platform.
- Strict Timeline: The existing cloud environment was planned for termination soon, requiring rapid migration of the data without disrupting critical business operations. The customer needed migration to a new production environment directly, requiring several architectural realignments. The large volume of data had to be securely and efficiently transferred from the legacy cloud to GCP.
- Stringent GRC protocols: Migration had to adhere to strict security and GRC frameworks.
The Solution
Softility delivered a high-impact migration and modernization effort, built around two key pillars: Data Migration and Data Management.
- Cross-Cloud Data Migration: Innovative usage of GCP Storage Transfer Service and integration objects to move cloud data into GCP.
- ~1 PB of structured data successfully transitioned: Developed new ETL pipelines in GCP, leveraging the power of GCP services, and enabled scalable data processing.
- File Optimization and Serialization: Designed a custom solution for data files pre-processing and improved ETL job speeds dramatically, reducing 5GB file processing from 6 minutes to an average of 40-50 seconds.
- Looker Migration: Migrated 150 base tables, 194 views, 1,500+ reports, and 60 dashboards, and optimized, developed, and reconfigured all Looker components to point to GCP-hosted datasets.
- Quick Rollout: Completed the migration to a new production environment directly without impacting business operations. Because of the direct rollout, the business unit cut down time to deploy data on the new platform by 3-4 months, significantly accelerating time to market for its services.
- Strategic Integration Readiness: Ensured the new data architecture aligned with the enterprise-wide platform integration. We configured schemas, pipelines, and storage structures to enable easy onboarding into future systems.
The Benefits
The successful migration of the customer’s data from a legacy cloud environment to GCP resulted in significant operational improvements and financial gains. The new data environment on GCP was now aligned with the upcoming GCP-based enterprise-wide data platform integration. The unified data architecture enabled greater sustainability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
~1 PB
Data migrated to GCP
150+
Base tables and 194 views
1,500+
Looker reports, 60 dashboards
2x
Faster deployment and
accelerated migration
90%
Reduction in 5GB file processing
time - from 6 mins to 40 secs
50%
Opex reduced as legacy cloud
expenses eliminated
Conclusion
The rapid data migration initiative was a strategic success, demonstrating how a well-executed migration strategy can drive cost savings, enhance efficiency, and enable long-term scalability. By leveraging Softility’s vast data transformation expertise and proven GCP migration experience, our customer positioned itself for continuous innovation and business growth. This data transformation initiative aligned with the company’s broader strategic data unification initiative, ensuring that migrated applications could seamlessly integrate into a unified data and cloud ecosystem.
With data migration from legacy to GCP in just 6 months, Softility helped out customer slash cloud costs in half and achieve accelerated time to market, enabled by a high-performance data infrastructure that supports advanced analytics, AI-driven insights, and future digital transformation goals.
About Softility Data Solutions
Some of the world’s largest enterprises repeatedly turn to Softility to address costly, fragmented, incomplete, and issue-ridden data architectures, warehouses, frameworks, and estates — trusting our commitment and proven solutions. With deep expertise in data advisory, engineering, analytics, and visualization, we have accelerated numerous data transformation projects, enabling our clients to unlock maximum value from their data. We help large enterprises structure chaotic data, modernize legacy architectures for scalability, agility, and performance, and uncover critical insights that drive profitability. Our expertise spans data strategy, engineering, modernization, analytics, visualization, DataOps, and managed services. We help you establish a clear context for all data sets, pipelines, lakes, and warehouses, deriving key insights through BI, ML, and AI tools. By leveraging Data Observability and DataOps, we ensure a healthy data estate—delivering high-quality data that is well-organized, profiled, transformed, democratized, reliable, relevant, consistent, and secure.
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