The first step to innovation: Tapping into your data lakes

Businesses worldwide have found that their data lakes have the power to advance their organizations further than they could have imagined. These data lakes are a powerful tool for innovation, allowing these organizations to store, analyze, and manage large amounts of data to drive insights and create new products and services. They can improve customer interactions, enhance R&D innovation, increase operational efficiencies, accelerate AI and machine learning, reduce duplication of effort and enable collaboration. The key is unlocking company data to do so.

What is a data lake?

A Hadoop data lake is a centralized repository that allows organizations to store their structured and unstructured data at any scale. Data can be stored as-is, without having to first structure it, to run different types of analytics. From visualizations and dashboards to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning to guide better decisions, this unstructured data can hold immense, innovative value when migrated and restructured.

Data-based innovation

Data shows, organizations that successfully innovate based on their data will outperform their competition. An Aberdeen survey saw organizations implementing data lake innovations outperform similar companies by 9% in organic revenue growth. These leaders were able to compile new types of analytics like automation/machine learning with new sources like log files, data from click-streams, social media, and internet-connected devices. The additional data helped them to identify and act upon opportunities for business growth faster by attracting (and retaining) customers, proactively maintaining devices, boosting productivity and making informed decisions.

Making the shift: a customer journey

Cirata has experience helping organizations unlock the full value of their data lakes by rapidly shifting away from legacy data technologies and underutilized datasets to more advanced and capable data platforms in the cloud. One notable example is their work with Manulife, a leading financial services firm based in Canada.

Manulife needed to migrate data across multiple geographies to support regional analytics for markets such as Japan, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore. The challenge was to ensure that the migration occurred without disrupting ongoing business operations in these regions.

Manulife had an 800-node Apache Hadoop cluster to manage vast amounts of financial data and analytics. However, they needed to shift to a more scalable and cost-effective cloud solution without interrupting their global business operations. They chose Cirata's Data Migrator for this complex migration process.

The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) at Manulife’s headquarters in Toronto demonstrated that Data Migrator would meet their requirements for scaling analytics and migrating large amounts of data to Microsoft Azure. Manulife needed to deploy nine local instances across three Azure regions, ensuring that the transition wouldn’t disrupt business operations in critical financial markets.

Using Cirata’s Data Migrator, Manulife successfully migrated 300TB of data across geographies, moving it to the Azure analytics platform. The solution enabled rapid access to insights, allowing Manulife to accelerate their decision-making and gain earlier access to critical analytics. In addition, the migration allowed Manulife to reduce its reliance on Hadoop infrastructure, leading to significant cost savings.

The results

With Cirata’s help, Manulife achieved the following outcomes:

• Successfully migrated 300 TB of data to Microsoft Azure across multiple geographies, without disruption to business operations.
• Gained faster access to the Azure analytics platform, providing earlier insights that improved decision-making.
• Reduced spending on Hadoop infrastructure, allowing the company to optimize costs while scaling their analytics capabilities.

The power of seamless data migration

Cirata's advanced data migration technology empowers organizations like Manulife to take the first step toward innovation. Our platform allows for the seamless migration, transfer, and replication of data within enterprise data lakes—without any disruption to critical systems or applications. The migration is fully automated, requires minimal delay, and operates at an extreme scale, making it an ideal solution for organizations involved in advanced analytics, AI, and other data-driven initiatives.

Cirata's technology plays a pivotal role in helping businesses unlock the full potential of their data, enabling them to innovate faster and achieve impactful outcomes. If your organization is ready to take the next step toward modernizing your data lake infrastructure, contact us to learn more about how Cirata's Hadoop data migration solutions can support your goals.