The Challenge
A regional financial institution operating across three Gulf countries was running its core analytics on legacy on-premises infrastructure. Reports that business leaders depended on took 24 hours to refresh — leaving decision-makers working with yesterday’s data in a fast-moving market.
The infrastructure team was spending 60% of their time on maintenance rather than innovation, and the organisation had no disaster recovery capability worth the name.
Our Approach
We began with a two-week discovery engagement — interviewing business leaders, finance directors, and IT staff to understand not just the technical landscape, but the business drivers and risk appetite.
Our recommendation: a phased migration to Microsoft Azure, anchored by Azure Synapse Analytics for the data platform and Azure Data Factory for orchestration.
Rather than a big-bang migration, we designed a parallel-run approach — keeping the legacy system operational while we built, tested, and validated the new platform. This eliminated business risk and gave stakeholders confidence before the cut-over.
What We Built
- Azure Synapse Analytics — unified data warehouse and analytics platform
- Azure Data Factory — automated data pipelines replacing manual ETL scripts
- Power BI Premium — real-time dashboards embedded into the existing Microsoft 365 environment
- Azure Site Recovery — disaster recovery with sub-4-hour RTO
- Role-based access control — granular data access aligned with regulatory requirements
The Outcomes
The results exceeded the client’s expectations at every level:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Report refresh time | 24 hours | < 5 minutes |
| Infrastructure maintenance effort | 60% of IT time | < 15% |
| DR capability | None | Sub-4-hour RTO |
| Manual ETL scripts | 47 | 0 |
Three months post-migration, the organisation’s CFO described the platform as “transformative — we’re finally making decisions based on what’s happening today, not what happened yesterday.”
What Made It Work
The client’s IT team were active participants throughout — not bystanders. We ran weekly knowledge transfer sessions alongside the implementation, ensuring that by go-live, their team owned and understood every component of the new platform.
That’s the AstraClarity approach: we leave our clients more capable than we found them.