Are you on PowerCenter? If you are, you’ve probably already started to wonder what’s next for your organization.
You know that migrating to cloud data management is a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’, but how and when you manage this transition will have a significant impact on your organisation’s data strategy and technology investments in the near future.
The pressure is on for data leads like yourself to roadmap a migration strategy that has the best commercial or practical impact on your business. Yet without a deadline to work towards, how do you know when the time is right to take your data management to the cloud?
Making the right investments at the right time has been flagged to us by data leads as a critical concern: making sure you have all of the information you need to make those decisions is essential.
After the recent IWT, now is the time to delve into cloud modernization – specifically switching from PowerCenter to Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC).
The case for cloud data management
Firstly, let’s cover the essentials. Why will cloud data management be a strategic investment for your organisation – and how will your ROI be affected by when you choose to migrate?
To recap on the core benefits:
Data volumes are rapidly escalating. Scalability isn’t a nice to have for the far-flung future, it’s becoming a pressing need. Cloud data management can be a far more cost-effective way to manage this ever-increasing amount of data.
It gives you more flexibility. Looking to introduce new applications? Integrate a new SaaS? Cloud data management platforms will give you more agility, while existing on-premise solutions are becoming more limited in their integrations.
Security is implemented as a design principle. Security is at the forefront of the product’s development lifecycle, ensure customers data is safe and secure to industry standards and regulatory compliance.
You can empower people to use data. Creating a data democracy, where anyone can use data to propel business objectives, is fast becoming a must-have. At present, though, it’s still a commercial advantage and could be a good reason on its own to explore cloud data management.
You’re going to need it to build exciting, innovative data solutions in the future. Cloud is an integral part of a modern data architecture. As your organisation’s demands on data change – it’s intrinsic to so many business functions now, and that is only increasing – your foundations need to be ready to support them.
Some databases are no longer supported. If you’re having to migrate some specific historic databases, it may make more financial sense – and cause less disruption – to move related integrations to the cloud as well.
Should I migrate from PowerCenter to IDMC now – or wait?
To answer that question, we’d need to know more about your business and your data strategy (you can drop us a note here and we’ll give you a call to talk it through) but if you’re on PowerCenter, there are a lot of benefits to switching to Informatica’s Data Management Cloud sooner rather than later.
1. ROI can be significant, and fast.
According to independent research, organisations that migrate to IDMC can experience:
- 328% average ROI over a 3-year period
- A 4.2 month estimated payback period
- 50% reduced time spent on platform maintenance
- 90% accelerated KPI development
2. You can take integrations with you.
However deeply embedded your PowerCenter integrations are, transferring them to IDMC should be simple thanks to Informatica’s Migration Factory tool. We talk about this tool and our process in more detail in our Cloud Modernization guide. We suggest reading the guide to see the full process, but in a nutshell, it eradicates disruption in the changeover.
3. You can have more control thanks to low-code, no-code cloud data management.
IDMC promises a far more collaborative experience with your data – all helping towards that ‘data democracy’ mentioned above. Low-code, no-code cloud-based tools allow you to respond to business requirements and changes in almost real-time, without lengthy development cycles that on-prem data management platforms can bring. Again, this is an advantage that is better introduced sooner rather than later if you want to transform how your organisation uses data.
Our final thoughts on migrating from PowerCenter to IDMC
This isn’t a case of replacing an expired piece of technology: PowerCenter is very much still up and running, and delivering solutions that many of you need. Deciding when to migrate should be about the advantages it can bring to your business and the foundation it builds for your future data strategy. If you have big ambitions with data, then yes, migrating to cloud data management soon could be a strategic investment.