The Hidden Costs of Cloud Data Lakes

This blog series from Cazena's engineering team investigates the hidden costs of cloud data lakes. Learn the top three hidden costs of cloud data lakes!

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Worthington Industries

A fast cloud migration to a SaaS Data Lake on AWS helped Worthington’s IT team keep their project on track and delivered tangible outcomes.

Cloud Modernization

The Instant Cloud Data Lake model enables IT to support innovation efficiently and cost-effectively, with no additional staff or skills required.

Empowers Agility

Empowers organizational agility, with a unified data lake supporting a variety of maintenance, operations, quality, and business functions.

Real Outcomes

Improved quality, productivity and throughput, by using data and analytics to optimize machines and processes.

About Worthington Industries

Worthington Industries is North America’s premier value-added steel processor, providing a broad set of capabilities, products and services for markets including automotive, construction, and agriculture. The Cazena Instant Cloud Data Lake on AWS helped Worthington complete their migration and deliver measurable outcomes across the organization.

Worthington Industries began its cloud data lake journey in early 2018, as part of an ongoing initiative to increase quality and reduce costs. With many plants, many machines and many processes, finding even incremental opportunities for improvement or cost savings makes a big impact.

They started with an internal pilot in their datacenter, using the commercial Hadoop/Spark software to build their own data lake stack. But while the IT team could see the potential, they found the stack complex and time-consuming to manage. To be successful, Worthington realized they needed a data lake that was easier to use.

A local referral led the Worthington IT team to the Cazena Instant Cloud Data Lake on Amazon AWS. Cazena is a complete, end-to-end data lake delivered as private SaaS. That meant no new staff or skills would be required to manage or support the data lake, which was very appealing to the team. They got started right away. 

The Challenges: Modernization is Hard

Stand up a modern enterprise data lake for advanced analytics with limited skills and IT resources

Efficiently collect and analyze data from a wide variety of sources — machines, manufacturing plants, etc.

Use data and analytics for manufacturing optimization, predictive maintenance, quality improvement and cost reduction

The Solution: A SaaS Data Lake is Easy

The Cazena SaaS Data Lake is delivered production-ready, paving the way for the migration of their DIY on-premises data lake to AWS. Cazena’s built-in tools and hybrid gateways ensured fast, secure connections between the SaaS Data Lake and datacenters.

Then, the team migrated their data, workloads and applications. Cazena’s software, automation and AWS integration accelerated the migration. Today, the SaaS data lake requires very little administration from Worthington. IT manages user assignment and data governance. No other IT, DevOps or security resources are required, because everything is fully managed and monitored by Cazena.

Worthington teams use a variety of analytics tools and processes with the data lake. Some connect with their existing Tableau visualization software, or use built-in advanced analytics interfaces to power new applications and projects. Others use cases are more specialized, such as internal tools that support specific quality processes. Worthington experienced many positive outcomes from their SaaS Data Lake quickly, including improved quality, improved productivity, higher yield, and organizational agility.

No More Time Lost to Troubleshooting.

“The SaaS model for the data lake is important for us. My team previously spent a large portion of our time on troubleshooting platform performance, wrestling with security and connectivity issues, and managing upgrades. It was difficult to find qualified resources to help. We can now focus our time on the data engineering and analytics activities that will drive real value for our business."

Ken Kaufman Director of BI and Analytics, Worthington Industries

Solution Partners

AWS

Worthington's Instant Cloud Data Lake from Cazena embeds many AWS products including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Block Service (EBS), Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS and standard services such as Amazon VPC, AWS Transit Gateways, AWS Route 53, AWS Key Management Service and others.

Cloudera

Worthington's Data Lake includes several embedded data engines and components from Cloudera's best of breed stack.

See a Screencast Video

Get a walk-through of the self-service SaaS Console of Cazena's Instant Data Lake.

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Jumpstart Analytics & Machine Learning

Find out more about CDAO Jumpstart, the accelerator for analytics and machine learning in the cloud.

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