Cloud computing was nascent just 15 years ago. Now, it is a top priority due to the cloud being more cost-effective, more powerful, more reliably available than on-prem deployments, better security, improved back-ups, lower staff requirements, better toolsets, and more.

Every one of our 100+ customers are making the shift to the cloud for their most important strategic data initiatives. However, no one wants to simply ‘lift-and-shift’ what they’re doing on premises today. Instead, the focus is on how to migrate to cloud-based infrastructure and tools while shedding technical debt and improving analytical capabilities.

This is where Prominence’s engineering team comes into play. Our team works with you to develop a roadmap for your cloud transition. This ensures everyone understands the target future-state of moving to the cloud, what is changing from their current-state processes / tools, and provides information and education on how to manage the transition successfully.

With the roadmap in place, our team assists yours by providing additional bandwidth during the transition so you can ‘keep the lights on’ while simultaneously moving to your future-state. Read below to learn about how we’ve supported customers moving to the cloud, the incredible results they’ve seen, and the roles the Prominence team has filled.

West Coast Academic Medical Center

A large academic medical center on the west coast is focused on creating four large data marts and making them available to users across the enterprise. These data marts are being built on their Azure instance and leveraging the advanced toolset and capabilities of Databricks.

Prominence assisted the customer by helping configure the Azure instance and deploying Databricks. Upon deployment of the environment and tools, Prominence then assisted the customer with:

• Establishing gold-silver-bronze data tiers for the data lake
• Connecting to source systems for data extraction
• Automating data pipelines from source to end product
• Integrating customer’s data visualization tools
• Re-use existing data transformations / metrics / models and align them to future-state analytics development processes to remove technical debt
• Creating example data transformations and models for high-priority needs
• Complete knowledge transfer to customer team

The result? The customer was able to

• Migrate critical data sets to the cloud
• Empower staff with advanced analytics tools and libraries within a single analytics environment
• Automate data pipelines and flows for consumers
• Dramatically improve performance on data refreshes and complex transformations
• Increase governance and data oversight

Now, the customer is able to provide their clinical operations, finance, research, and academic divisions with high-performance, trusted data that allows for cutting edge data science, ML, AI and more.

Integrated Delivery Network

A large, Midwest integrated delivery network with more than 50 hospitals was experience extremely long refresh times on their reporting database, with individual jobs running over 4 hours. This led to downstream impacts of reports not being generated on-time, dashboards failing to load new data, analysts unable to do work until the refresh completed, and more.

Prominence worked with the customer to migrate one of the most time-consuming jobs to their cloud and leveraged Apache Spark to recreate the refresh process. The cloud gave the customer the ability to ramp computing power up and down depending on the need, instead of being limited by on-premises resources.

The result? The job went from 4 hours to 8 minutes, a 96% reduction in run time. Not only did this individual job benefit from the cloud, but the customer is using the cloud to run multiple, resource-intensive jobs simultaneously, further reducing the refresh time for their massive data sets.

Non-Profit System

A non-profit in the northern Midwest was experiencing difficulty maintaining their on-premises environments, and even more challenges finding and retaining the staff required to keep them up and running. This meant their BI platform performed sluggishly causing end-user dissatisfaction, and limited their ability to deploy new analytics solutions.

Prominence was engaged by the customer to migrate their analytics architecture to the cloud. We helped configure the cloud environment for their BI platform, ensured that processing power and storage would increase or decrease based on demand, and then migrated their platform.

This led to a dramatic decrease in lag time between a user request / interaction with their BI tool and the result. Visualizations and queries that took minutes to run are completing in seconds, and new, mission-critical dashboards are being deployed without concern that they may hinder performance.

The next phase of the engagement will evolve their data preparation techniques to take advantage of he new toolsets available on their cloud to further improve performance, increase data literacy, and accomplish their next strategic initiatives.