Published on May 27, 2025
Organizations across industries are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives by migrating data to the cloud. Modern cloud data architectures deliver business agility, innovation, and enhanced security—but the migration process itself can be complex, costly, and risky.
According to one study from Accenture, nearly 70% of cloud data migration projects exceed their budgets, and more than half experience significant delays. Why? Because most organizations lack visibility into their data ecosystem before migration begins.
This is where metadata-driven data migration emerges as a game-changing approach.
Metadata-driven data migration leverages comprehensive information about your data—its structure, relationships, quality, usage patterns, and business context—to guide and optimize the entire migration process. Rather than simply "lifting and shifting" data assets to the cloud, this approach ensures you're moving the right data, at the right time, in the right way.
Data storage is costly even in the cloud. This is why modern CIOs recommend only migrating data to the cloud if it has downstream business value. But how do you identify what data matters most? The answer lies in metadata.
Traditional approaches to cloud migration often focus exclusively on the technical aspects of moving data from point A to point B. This leads to several common pitfalls:
Migrating "garbage data" that consumes cloud resources without delivering business value
Disrupting critical business processes by failing to understand legacy data dependencies
Underestimating migration complexity due to hidden relationships between data assets
Exceeding cloud costs by moving unnecessary or redundant data
Missing optimization opportunities by not understanding data usage patterns
As cloud migration expert Anthony McMahon warns: "Incorrect scoping of the migration poses a significant risk to the migration, especially around cost."
Metadata delivers meaningful context about data, such as quality level, top users, common joins, reviews, and much more. This context is a powerful guide to help you identify the data most critical to migrate. By leveraging metadata for cloud migrations, leaders can:
Not all data deserves equal priority in your migration timeline. (As one customer put it: “Not all data gets to fly first class.”) A metadata-driven approach enables you to identify and prioritize your most valuable data assets based on usage patterns, business criticality, and downstream dependencies.
According to Jim Haas, Chief Data Architect at Fiserv: "During our cloud migration, part of this is understanding what you have, whether it's locked up in people's heads or in spreadsheets flying around in an email." Using metadata to track data consumption patterns helps you identify what matters most.
One of the biggest challenges in data migration is understanding the potential ripple effects of moving specific data assets. Metadata-driven migration provides comprehensive impact analysis capabilities that let you:
Identify all downstream applications and reports that depend on specific data sources
Map out data lineage across your entire ecosystem
Anticipate potential business disruptions before they occur
Coordinate with affected stakeholders proactively
This visibility dramatically reduces the risk of unexpected issues during and after migration.
Cloud resources aren't free, and poor migration planning can lead to significant cost overruns. By leveraging metadata to understand your data's structure, volume, usage patterns, and growth trends, you can make smarter decisions about:
What data to migrate versus archive or purge
Which cloud storage tiers to use for different data types
How to optimize data models for cloud performance
When to schedule resource-intensive migration tasks
As industry analyst Dan Kirsch advises: "To lift and shift then modernize is expensive and means you'll be moving useless data. Clean out your closet before you move into a new house!"
Metadata-driven migration significantly accelerates your timeline by eliminating time-consuming manual discovery processes. Instead of spending months analyzing database schemas and interviewing business users, you can leverage existing metadata to:
Automatically map data relationships and dependencies
Identify data quality issues that need remediation before migration
Understand usage patterns to prioritize migration waves
Detect redundant data that can be consolidated
This acceleration means you'll realize the benefits of cloud migration faster while reducing the overall project cost.
The value of metadata doesn't end when your migration is complete. By continuing to track data usage, performance metrics, and cost patterns in your cloud environment, you can:
Identify opportunities to optimize storage and compute resources
Monitor query performance and adjust data models accordingly
Track changing usage patterns to inform future architecture decisions
Calculate and demonstrate ROI from your cloud investment
Alation's data intelligence platform provides the foundation for successful metadata-driven cloud migrations by delivering:
Before migrating data, you need to know what you have. Alation creates a unified view of all enterprise data across hundreds of disparate sources, giving you complete visibility into your data landscape. This comprehensive view helps identify critical data assets and understand their relationships—essential information for planning a successful migration.
Alation's unique consumption tracking and behavioral analysis engine help you identify the most frequently used data and BI assets. This intelligence allows you to prioritize high-value data in your migration waves, ensuring that your most important business processes continue uninterrupted.
Alation provides detailed lineage tracking across both technical and business layers, helping you anticipate how moving specific data assets might affect downstream processes. This insight enables proactive coordination with stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition.
As Anthony Seraphim, VP of Data Governance at Texas Mutual Insurance Company, explains: "Alation was critical in determining the priorities and sequence at which data assets and key user groups were migrated to the Snowflake Data Cloud."
Cloud migration is just the beginning of your transformation journey. Alation continually monitors data consumption across your infrastructure, helping you identify and optimize heavily used queries and resources for both performance and cost savings. Tools like the Snowflake Native App Peak Performance can help you optimize costs and improve Snowflake credit consumption, storage, and query efficiency.
Fiserv, a leading finance technology services company issuing more than 1.6 billion credit cards in the US, leveraged metadata to revolutionize its data management processes during cloud migration.
"With Alation, we've seen a great improvement in data literacy in the company, where data that was previously locked away in silos is now available for people to learn about," recalls Jim Haas, Chief Data Architect.
The result? Fiserv's cloud data warehouse now provides data intelligence across 250,000+ distinct fields from Fiserv's core systems to thousands of registered users.
To maximize the benefits of a metadata-driven approach to cloud migration:
Start with a comprehensive metadata assessment to understand what data you have, where it resides, who uses it, and how critical it is to business operations.
Develop clear data governance policies that define ownership, quality standards, and security requirements for migrated data.
Establish migration criteria based on business value, usage patterns, data quality, and technical compatibility with cloud platforms.
Engage business stakeholders early to understand their needs and concerns regarding data migration.
Create a detailed migration roadmap that prioritizes high-value, frequently used data while minimizing business disruption.
Implement continuous monitoring throughout the migration process to track progress, identify issues, and measure success.
Document lessons learned after each migration wave to refine your approach for subsequent phases.
Learn more about the steps in detail in this blog, 8 Best Practices for a Seamless Data Migration to the Cloud.
Cloud data migration doesn't have to be a high-risk, budget-busting endeavor. By leveraging metadata to drive your migration strategy, you can:
Reduce migration costs and timelines
Minimize business disruption
Optimize cloud resource utilization
Accelerate your digital transformation journey
As organizations continue to modernize their data architectures, those who adopt a metadata-driven approach will gain a significant competitive advantage—migrating faster, spending less, and delivering greater business value from their cloud investments.
Ready to transform your cloud migration strategy? Discover how Alation's data intelligence platform can power your metadata-driven migration journey. Get a demo today to see it in action.
Want to learn more about cloud data migration best practices? Download our white paper: "5 Steps to Ensure the Success of Your Cloud Data Migration"
Loading...