Migrating Legacy ETL to IDMC: What you need to know  

Legacy ETL systems, while robust and familiar, often lack the scalability, agility, and cloud-native capabilities of modern solutions. This can hinder your organization’s ability to leverage data for competitive advantage. Migrating your legacy ETL to Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) offers a compelling way to modernize your data integration landscape and ensure your data is ready to drive AI innovation.Let’s take a look at Informatica’s IDMC and explore what you need to know when planning to migrate your ETL from legacy tools like DataStage, Ab Initio, SSIS and PowerCenter.

Benefits of IDMC

Since IDMC is cloud-native at scale and AI-native at scale, it provides advantages over traditional data integration tools, especially for businesses modernizing their data warehouse, data lake, or analytics in the cloud. Benefits of IDMC include:

• Scalability and elasticity – handle massive data volumes with ease, scaling seamlessly up or down based on your needs.
• Cloud-native architecture – provides agility and cost-efficiency of the cloud for your data integration processes.
• Modern capabilities – offers advanced features like data quality management, data governance, and self-service data preparation.
• Reduced complexity – consolidate multiple tools and processes into a single platform, simplifying your data landscape.
• Faster time to insights – streamline data integration and access insights.

Considerations for Migrating Legacy ETL to IDMC

When it comes to migrating ETL to IDMC, applications can be grouped into PowerCenter and non-PowerCenter ETL. For PowerCenter applications, Informatica offers a Migration Factory tool that certified Platinum Partners (such as Bitwise) can use to accelerate migration of PowerCenter to IDMC. 

For other ETL applications, there are not many options other than using brute force to manually convert the jobs to IDMC. This is where Bitwise can de-risk and accelerate the project with our comprehensive tools and capabilities to migrate ETL tools like DataStage, Ab Initio and SSIS to IDMC. 

For either scenario, common migration challenges include identifying and mapping data sources and targets, handling data transformations and cleansing, ensuring data quality and consistency, and managing user access and security.  

See our Bitwise and Informatica page for more details on our ETL modernization partnership.

Planning your Migration to IDMC

There are many planned and unplanned challenges that can come up when migrating legacy ETL to IDMC. Here are some key steps for careful planning and execution to mitigate challenges and risks:

1. Assessment: Analyze your existing ETL landscape, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement.
2. Target state definition: Define your desired end-state with IDMC, considering your data integration needs and future goals.
3. Migration strategy: Choose the appropriate migration approach, considering factors like complexity, risk tolerance, and time constraints.
4. Tooling and resources: Identify the necessary tools and resources for code conversion, data migration, and testing.
5. Phased approach: Plan a phased migration to minimize disruption and ensure business continuity.
6. Testing and validation: Rigorously test migrated pipelines and data to ensure accuracy and completeness.
7. Monitoring and support: Implement comprehensive monitoring and support processes to address any issues after migrating to IDMC.

Working with a specialized migration partner that utilizes the optimal combination of automation tools and frameworks can significantly reduce the time and cost of translating your ETL jobs to IDMC.

How Bitwise Accelerates ETL Migration to IDMC

To make ETL modernizations more efficient and less risky, Bitwise provides a comprehensive solution that encompasses automation tools, frameworks and expertise aimed at expediting the migration of legacy ETLs to cloud platforms like IDMC.

We take a phased approach to migration where we use automation tools at every stage of Assessment, Conversion, and Testing & Validation.

ETL Migration Automation Tools and Frameworks

• Source ETL Code Analyzer – conducting a thorough analysis of the source ETL code base is crucial for successful project planning and delivery. The Source ETL Code Analyzer tool provides valuable insights on complexities, uncertainties, intricacies, and data lineage that may impact the project. During the Assessment phase of migration, Bitwise uses the reports generated by the tool to make informed decisions on design, solution approach, and planning for subsequent operations.

• ETL Conversion Framework – utilizing our expertise combined with utilities such as Bitwise’s Automated ETL Converter tool and Informatica’s automated IDMC converter tools, we’ve streamlined the process of migrating from traditional ETL platforms like PowerCenter, DataStage, SSIS and even Ab Initio to cloud-native platforms like IDMC. Our framework, backed by extensive knowledge of mappings and workarounds, handles the complex tasks while our ETL Migration Specialists, who are well-trained and have access to the latest AI tools and vendor product teams, deliver the optimal solution.

• ETL Validation Framework – with its schema and data validation capabilities, this Python-based automated validation tool streamlines the ETL migration process from source to target and can be used for testing stored procedures, views and MV migrations. To successfully migrate legacy ETL to IDMC, Bitwise uses this automation tool for high-performance testing of relational, flat files, and cloud databases with support for both full and sample data validation as well as schema validation. Plus, the tool is lightweight, platform agnostic and seamlessly integrates with any CI/CD tools and schedulers to handle complex deployments.

To further accelerate delivery, we adhere to the Agile methodology throughout the different phases of modernization, incorporating predefined processes such as daily scrums, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and feedback loops with the client to ensure complete satisfaction.

Getting Started

Migrating legacy ETL to IDMC can be a transformative initiative for your organization, especially when modernizing your data warehouse or data lake environment to get your data ready for AI use cases. ETL code locked in legacy systems like Ab Initio, DataStage, SSIS or PowerCenter can hold a lot of complexity and lack of understanding due to poor documentation. Automation is the key to effectively unlock the potential of your data by modernizing ETL in a highly scalable cloud-native platform. 

To help organizations exploring ETL modernization, Bitwise offers a high-level assessment conducted through a questionnaire and sample jobs, enabling us to gather key information about the legacy ETL environment and target cloud platform. Explore our Automated ETL Migration solution to learn more and get started with a time and cost estimation for migration to help with your evaluations.