Cloud migration & IT services for international insurance and reinsurance broker

About BioLap

BioLap, a company located in London, is a business intelligence software consultancy that designs, implements, and supports planning, analysis, and reporting solutions. British company specializes in designing data warehouse solutions. It is also a sales and distribution partner of US-based PARIS Technologies, arcplan Enterprise, Microsoft BI products, and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design. BioLap has been working for over seven years with these products, delivering innovative solutions for companies in the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, and South Africa.

Business needs

BioLap was looking for a partner who could support the project for the international insurance and reinsurance broker that involved cloud migration. For the company’s client, it was business-critical to conduct cloud migration process from on-premise SQL server to a cloud-based Microsoft Azure environment. As BioLaP didn’t have the necessary IT capacity to proceed with the tasks in-house, the company started the data migration to the cloud with Codibly.

Main requirements for the cloud migration process were:

• Providing accurate reporting data on a daily basis without interrupting the existing end of day processes and backup works
• The process of moving data to the cloud involves significant data volumes (data transfer up to millions of records in single tables)
• Need to perform complex transformations and calculations
• Short time for the overnight load due to the staff operating in the time zones around the world

Solution

Codibly was responsible for building a data repository using the Azure cloud solutions. The main goal was the optimization of the performance of the data load process that involves considerable data volumes. Once our team identified bottlenecks in the SQL server infrastructure, Codibly could prepare robust cloud infrastructure that eliminated those blockers and migrate to the cloud all the necessary data.

As a cloud provider, Azure cloud doesn’t offer “out of the box” data feed facilities that offer the ability to schedule and run a job or series of procedures. Codibly team resolve that issue by integrating programmatic setups and ‘run-tables’ to facilitate the entire load, transformation, and processing of the data warehouse, so it would be held in Azure cloud once the migration is complete. That required repointing the load tables to the source tables in Oracle. Once the data was loaded, several tests were run a day, speeding up the process and scaling Azure cloud up and down until we found the optimum price-performance point, which ensures overall cost savings.

After creating the load process, a scheduled process was designed to drop and recreate indices and schedule the transformation process before publishing the data to users.

When the cloud migration has been finished, Codibly team conducted a handover session to transfer the intellectual property to the internal team of BIOLAP, allowing the cloud platform future maintenance.