10-Day Cloud Deployment, Operational Streamlining for a Retail Major in UAE

Client Profile

Our client is recognized as the largest consumer cooperative in the UAE. They aim to provide consumer products at the best prices while also meeting customer expectations. They have adopted the latest technologies and systems for smooth management and improved customer efficiency. The client wanted to expand their reach, help customers beat market fluctuations, and gain the best profits. They tried to gain an equilibrium between their economic and social goals.

Challenges

The client wanted to migrate Microsoft Fabric resources from Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) to a Cloud Solution Provider subscription. This transition was difficult due to the following reasons:

• The client wanted to migrate all active Microsoft assets across its three workspaces-inventory, sales, and marketing.
• They provided a tough deadline involving communication and coordination with their internal development partner.
• This was not a quick system migration process as it consisted of migrating sensitive artifacts and data such as semantic models, pipelines, dataflows, and more linked to external sources.
• A previously failed migration attempt resulted in data overwrites, locking, and lineage conflicts.
• The client struggled with a couple of artifacts due to misaligned destinations.

Anunta’s Solution

• Anunta’s technical experts paused the development activities to restrict the intervention with the migration. 
• The tough deadline was met with consistent efforts and much-needed technical expertise.  
• The Anunta team manually worked on the broken bindings, such as dataflow to Lakehouse outputs, recreated lineage, and reassigned security roles in CSP workspaces.  
• The Excel tracker was used to monitor the migration progress, and the iterative workspace-level testing verified the progress.  
• The team used PowerShell scripts to automate artifact inventory and further manually verified complex assets.  
• Power BI and dashboard file workflows were used to export and re-publish reports and semantic models.  
• The team addressed all post-migration and pipeline issues. Initially, the pipeline was linked to external databases and OneDrive, which was an issue, and Anunta’s team reconfigured all these connections after the migration.
• The development team modified the Lakehouse tables and semantic model during migration. Several team members worked daily to ensure successful development and migration.  
• Weekly progress and updates were managed and shared in real-time despite the dependencies on the MathCo team.  

Key Benefits

• 100% migration was completed within the client’s original timeline of 10 days.  
• All major artifacts were successfully migrated, except one with external API dependencies.  
• Lakehouse and Lineage bindings were configured and tested.  
• Active communication across teams ensured a smooth migration journey.