Most global enterprises are not tied to a single legacy vendor. Instead, they manage a fragmented ecosystem of Informatica mappings, IBM DataStage sequences, and Microsoft SSIS packages. While the goal is to consolidate this logic within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, the diversity of proprietary formats creates a massive modernization bottleneck. Attempting to modernize these disparate estates manually is not only slow but also introduces unacceptable risks to data integrity and regulatory compliance.
To reach a state of AI readiness, organizations must move beyond tool-specific migrations and adopt a unified modernization strategy that treats legacy logic as strategic infrastructure, not just technical debt.
Step 1: Cross-Platform Logic Discovery
The first challenge in a multi-tool environment is a lack of centralized visibility. Business logic is often duplicated across Informatica and SSIS, or buried in undocumented DataStage sequences. Without a unified view, engineers risk migrating redundant or conflicting logic to the cloud, which drives up cost and undermines trust in downstream analytics and AI.
Utilizing CRAWLER360 allows for a comprehensive, cross-platform metadata scan. By programmatically deconstructing the XML of Informatica, the job definitions of DataStage, and the packages of SSIS, CRAWLER360 provides a single, visual map of the entire data estate. This allows teams to identify high-value logic, prune technical debt, and prioritize the migration based on actual architectural dependencies rather than vendor silos.
Step 2: Standardizing Logic via Automated Translation
Each legacy ETL tool has its own proprietary way of handling transformations, lookups, and joins. Manual conversion requires developers with deep expertise in both the legacy source and the Snowflake target, a combination that is increasingly rare and expensive.
SHIFT® Cloud provides the automated translation layer for this unified transition. By ingesting the various proprietary formats, SHIFT® Cloud refactors the diverse logic into standardized, Snowflake-native SQL and Snowpark. This standardization ensures that regardless of where the logic originated, it is executed in the cloud with the same high performance and efficiency. It moves the organization from a fragmented legacy state to a streamlined, cloud-native environment that can support modern AI workloads.
Step 3: Unified Validation and Parity Testing
In a multi-vendor estate, the risk of logic drift is amplified. A calculation that worked one way in SSIS must behave exactly the same way when executed in Snowflake. Manual testing across these different systems is a primary reason migration projects exceed their budgets and timelines.
To ensure functional equivalence, we utilize TESTER to automate validation across the entire modernization lifecycle. By comparing the output of the legacy Informatica, DataStage, or SSIS jobs against the newly translated Snowflake code, TESTER identifies discrepancies at the row and column level. This provides the quantified trust necessary to certify the data for AI models and to decommission legacy servers with confidence.
Modernization Imperatives for CIOs and CDOs
Modernizing legacy ETL is about more than just moving data; it is about liberating and standardizing the business logic that defines the enterprise. By utilizing a unified blueprint for discovery, translation, and validation, organizations can bridge the gap between their fragmented past and an AI-driven future. For data leaders, this is how you achieve the speed, scale, and governance required for modern AI-driven intelligence, while reducing risk and total cost of ownership in the process.
About Next Pathway
Next Pathway is the leading choice for automated cloud migration and modern data transformation. We provide the robust tools and deep expertise required to move large, complex, and legacy workloads to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud quickly, with unmatched performance and accuracy. Backed by a proven track record of more than 160 successful migrations worldwide, our proprietary SHIFT Product Platform consisting of CRAWLER360, SHIFT® Cloud and TESTER, automates the end-to-end path to a successful cloud migration.
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