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Snowflake has quickly become a leading choice for organizations looking to modernize their data environment. Its scalability, flexibility, and ability to support advanced use cases like AI and machine learning make it an attractive platform. But a successful migration requires more than just enthusiasm; it requires careful planning. Without asking the right questions upfront, companies risk running into costly surprises and underdelivering on expectations. This article provides a checklist of critical questions to guide a smooth, value-driven migration.
Question 1: What Are Our Business Goals for this Migration?
Every successful migration starts with clarity on why you’re making the move. Are you looking to reduce costs, scale analytics, prepare for AI initiatives, or retire legacy systems? Defining success early ensures alignment between IT and business stakeholders. At Green Leaf, we emphasize a strategy driven approach; aligning technology decisions directly with business outcomes so every investment moves the needle.
Question 2: Which Workloads and data should we migrate first?
Not all data needs to move at once. Establishing a phased migration strategy helps reduce risk and manage complexity. Identify workloads that will deliver immediate value, while also planning how to sunset or retire redundant legacy systems. Prioritizing based on business impact and technical dependencies keeps the migration efficient and prevents bottlenecks.
Question 3: How will we ensure data quality and governance?
Clean, well-structured data is the foundation of an effective analytics program. Before migrating, companies should invest time in ensuring data is of high quality, accuracy, and consistency. Snowflake offers many built-in governance features like data quality monitoring and data metric functions, but these need to be aligned with broader organization standards. Establishing a governance framework before migration ensures your new environment delivers trusted insights from day one.
Question 4: Do we have the right skills and team in place?
Snowflake adoption requires subject matter expertise in cloud architecture, data modeling, and performance optimization. Many organizations discover gaps in their internal skill sets during migration. Evaluating your team’s readiness – and knowing when you engage experienced partners like Green Leaf – helps ensure the migration is not only completed successfully but sets up your team for long-term success.
Question 5: What is our budget and have we modeled ongoing costs?
Snowflake’s consumption-based model offers cost efficiency but also requires careful monitoring. Without oversight, usage can spike quickly and lead to unexpected bills. Building cost models, setting budgets, and configuring alerts to discover long-running resources are essential steps. Factoring hidden costs related to data egress, integration, or training – ensures your budget reflects the full picture and avoids unpleasant surprises.
Question 6: How will we manage performance and scalability?
Snowflake offers impressive scalability, but performance doesn’t take care of itself. Thoughtful decisions about warehouse sizing, query optimization, and clustering strategies are key to delivering the user experience stakeholders expect. Advanced features like multi-cluster warehouses or query acceleration can help, but should not be used as a band-aid in lieu of best practices. Achieving high platform performance requires planning and ongoing management to ensure efficiency.
Question 7: What does success look like 6-12 months after migration?
The migration itself is only the beginning. Establish clear metrics for adoption, performance, and ROI to evaluate progress months after go-live. Continuous optimization, whether through performance tuning, expanding workloads, or introducing new use cases, ensures you’re getting the most from your investment. A migration that is treated as an ongoing journey, not a one-time project, delivers lasting business value.
Conclusion
Asking the right questions upfront can mean the difference between a migration that struggles and one that transforms your business. By aligning goals, managing costs, and planning for governance and scalability, organizations can unlock the full potential of Snowflake. If your team is considering a move, Green Leaf can help with readiness assessments and migration planning sessions to ensure a smooth and impactful transition.