Modernising business intelligence architecture with AWS and Snowflake

Modernising BI architecture.

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Data is more than a strategic advantage for the financial sector, it is a doorway to innovation, decision-making and enhanced competitiveness. In this dynamic and ever-evolving sector, where seconds can make the difference between success and stagnation, business intelligence (BI) and data are the accelerant. And companies within this sector are well aware of the value they can extract from a well-defined and executed data strategy and supporting architecture.

This is why a South African financial services company specialising in employee benefits solutions for businesses asked Intellinexus to help modernise their BI architecture.

• SAP HANA
• Microsoft SQL Server

• AWS
• Matillion (Data Loading and ELT)
• Snowflake Data Cloud (Data Lake and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW))

The financial services company provides a wide range of services to organisations that include medical aid, retirement and risk benefits, employee wellness and employee assistance programmes. The company’s products and services are curated to help their clients attract and retain top talent while ensuring the ongoing well-being of existing employees.

Clients can customise the solutions provided by the financial services company to meet their own unique needs while benefiting from services designed to help them manage and administer their employee benefit programmes.

Intellinexus collaborated with the company as it embarked on a cloud modernisation journey focused on reimagining data access, visibility, analytics, governance and control.

The solution leveraged AWS as the preferred cloud provider with Snowflake Data Cloud as the data platform and Matillion as the data integration layer. Snowflake Data Cloud, a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) solution, provides a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering and data science, which makes it the perfect solution for the company to achieve its objectives.

Focusing on ensuring that the financial services company gained rich control over its data and insights, Intellinexus undertook an in-depth assessment across consumption, application and security. Thorough planning ensured the solution aligned with the business needs, followed by a detailed architecture design to ensure the company’s objectives and requirements were addressed and the right approaches were put in place. A comprehensive environment and security configuration process provided for a robust foundation in which the solution capable of handling the company’s data, analytics and intelligence requirements was developed.

• A comprehensive data and code migration from SAP HANA to Snowflake Data Cloud using an in-house developed code conversion utility.
• Matillion ETL replaced SAP HANA SDI for data ingestion and transformation.

The Intellinexus team of data and business subject matter experts, architects, analysts and engineers provided the financial services company with a highly agile, intelligent and modernised business intelligence architecture that delivered precisely to the organisation’s expectations and allows for it to innovate and enhance its range of services and solutions.

The combination of talent and technology provided by Intellinexus resulted in a client that has an ongoing engagement and has already invested into more use-cases going forward. For the financial services company, the support and collaborative approach provided by the Intellinexus team ensured that the solution met its objectives.