Watco – Database Migration
Case Studies
Challenges & Solutions
Technical Environment
Results
Executive Summary
Client
Railroad Network
Industry
Manufacturing, Engineering, Transport & Logistics
Business Problem
The client wanted to modernize critical applications by moving selected workloads to Azure, but faced unreliable on–premises connectivity, stringent data–security mandates and limited IT capacity. Business leaders required uninterrupted analytics and faster AI/ML insights, yet operational risks, compatibility gaps and potential data loss threatened schedules, budgets and customer commitments today.
Outcome
- IT resources freed to pursue AI/ML initiatives
- Repeatable framework established for future cloud migrations
- Greater executive confidence through clear migration governance
Challenges
- No reliable and secure connectivity between on–premises systems and Azure
- Need to protect data during migration while minimizing downtime
- Compatibility limitations across legacy and cloud platforms
- Risk of data loss and extended outages
Solutions
- Utilized Database Migration Assistant and Azure Database Migration Service
- Performed upfront assessments to identify and remediate migration blockers
- Kept the source database online, limiting downtime to the final cut–over
- Enabled continuous synchronization to Azure SQL Database after the initial schema and data move
Technical Environment
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure Databricks SQL Analytics
- Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
- Microsoft SQL Azure
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Databricks, SAP, Power BI, Delta Lake
Results
- Trending topic identification latency cut to seconds.
- Indexing accelerated content search by orders of magnitude.
- Downtime mitigated through high–availability analytics cluster.