How to migrate your Master Data Management solution from on-prem to SaaS

Ambitious business executives understand the positive impact of migration to SaaS platform in today's highly competitive business world.

"Line-of-business leaders everywhere are bypassing IT departments to get applications from the cloud and paying for them like they would a magazine subscription." - Daryl Plummer, Managing Vice President, Gartner

These days, tech-inclined companies are obliged to migrate to the cloud instead of investing in updating new hardware and software. Of course, a cloud-based solution for data management comes with many benefits, including security, resilience, reliability, elasticity, and the reduced cost of ownership. However, despite the appealing benefits, many businesses can't or won’t make the leap to cloud simply because they can't! Instead, they rely on the "tried-and-true” on-prem MDM solution. For most MDM customers, the master data drives their businesses in what can be called a high-stake project. 

There are clear challenges when migrating from on-prem MDM to the SaaS platform. To address them, we've broken the process down so you can easily glide along the migration path, applying the best practices learned to date. Here are simple explanations of the phases.

Phase 1: Assess you on-prem MDM

A thorough understanding of your master data process and data governance system will dictate your cloud migration effort. A clear migration path with proven methodology is essential to success. Before you start, however, ask questions like “Are we putting the on-prem MDM to its best use?” “Are we ingesting any redundant or inoperable data into our on-prem MDM?” “Is there anything that I could have done differently in my current on-prem MDM?” “How can I improve the data governance of MDM data?” The answers will help you choose a migration path that suits your business. 

Phase 2: Plan your migration

With a detailed outlook of where you are and where you want to be, the next step is to plan your migration path. Assigning priorities to your wish list based on the business impact, estimated time and cost needed, and the overall benefit is vital for a successful migration. The identified pain points in the first phase serve to reinvent your MDM solution. However, these solutions need some level of marshalling; that's where Informatica comes into play. Here are few pointers to consider when planning your migration:

• Co-existence: You can have your on-prem MDM running and serving master data to your business applications, while you pilot your new SaaS Customer 360 solution. Informatica intelligent data management platform can run, interoperate, and support any combination of cloud and hybrid infrastructures. You won’t have to lift and shift your existing on-prem MDM to cloud on day one. However, if its cost effective, you can migrate everything in one shot. Informatica modernization team help you decide the best path.
• Reuse your integrations: When you are starting your journey to the cloud, you can still use your existing integration, pull data from your on-prem MDM staging area, and load it to the SaaS MDM solution. This offers the great benefit of repurposing your integration mappings and having a simple mapping to the SaaS MDM. By this, all your investments in complex system integration don’t go down the drain.
• Reuse your business rules: Informatica offers the best-in-class integration platform to decrease the risk involved in data migration. Using external rules configuration in the SaaS Businesses 360 console, you can leverage your existing business rules from your on-prem data quality engine.
• Reuse your workflows: To ease the migration of on-prem MDM to SaaS MDM, you can continue using your existing workflows in your on-prem MDM and extend them gradually to integrate with SaaS MDM. Once the migration is complete, we can switch to the workflows in the SaaS MDM platform. This will lower the burden of the migration while easing your data stewards in their learning curve.

Phase 3: Start small

The importance of starting small can’t be overstated; so, avoid the urge to put all your eggs in one basket. You can start as a pilot SaaS project with one domain and data from a couple of systems loaded on its platform. Familiarize yourself with the intricacies of the new SaaS system before stepping up completely. However, based on your case, you can choose to take a ‘lift and shift’ approach and move all the domains in one shot. Again, you can work with Informatica modernization and brainstorm the best possible solution.

You can request a few users to volunteer for the pilot program. The feedback you'll receive will help you tweak the solution in the right direction. If your business rules are significantly complex, you can leverage them without lifting and shifting. Informatica SaaS MDM works well in those moments when you want to use “external rules” from your on-prem MDM and data quality, as mentioned above. You won't need to rewrite existing rules from your on-prem solution. Instead, you can reuse those business rules and then gradually migrate them to Informatica cloud platform.

Phase 4: Expand

While it's important to start small, you'll need to expand your SaaS MDM solution eventually. We recommend expanding slowly but steadily by adding more domains and integrating into multiple systems - both upstream and downstream. Remember that MDM initiatives are always an evergreen project, and corporations always onboard new systems and retire old ones as business and technology needs change. In case of onboarding a new system into your MDM, you can start with SaaS platform, which provides secure and scalable throughput and instant decision-making through real-time APIs.

Phase 5: Optimize and improve

At this stage of the migration, your organization should already be buzzing with the new SaaS MDM that masters multiple domains and nurtures all business applications with your trusted master data. With such wind blowing in your sails, there's cause to celebrate. But you also want to tighten all the loose ends. As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets done.” 

It’s time to double-check all integration and business rules and fully optimize them to the SaaS world. In fact, it's a good time to measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - those critical key indicators of progress toward an intended result. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making, and help focus on what is important for business success. You can use a runbook to record your execution and onboarding of the new systems into the SaaS MDM. It's never too early to start making plans for a future scale-up. 

Final Word: What sets Informatica SaaS MDM apart?

As a top leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant for a Master Data Management solution and many other data management solutions, Informatica MDM stands apart from other vendors. Informatica’s single, comprehensive cloud-native AI-driven data management platform includes everything you need to migrate from on-prem to SaaS MDM. With these solutions working together, it will be a low-risk journey from on-prem MDM to SaaS MDM.  For a holistic approach tailored to your modernization needs, please contact Informatica.