Cognizant modernizes data warehouse and analytics with Oracle Cloud

Cognizant is a multinational technology company that provides business consulting, information technology, and outsourcing services. One of Fortune’s most admired companies for 12 years, the business has offices across 48 countries, employs approximately 318,400 people, and has annual revenues of more than $16.5 billion.

Thousands of employees use financial analytics reports at Cognizant. Their reports must be both accurate and produced quickly to help with decision-making.

As Cognizant’s business and subsequent data demands continued to grow rapidly, the firm found it increasingly challenging to deliver secure and visual analytics to help understand operational performance. Additionally, the IT team was spending increasing amounts of time troubleshooting, tuning, and securing the on-premises disaster recovery environment to overcome any failures. Every time it looked to scale the underlying infrastructure to accommodate growth, the IT team needed to secure a large upfront investment and considerable time to procure and configure.

Change couldn’t wait because the existing hardware infrastructure powering the financial reports was approaching its end of life. Cognizant needed to modernize its data platform and began to consider cloud alternatives. 

As a result of its positive experience as a longstanding Oracle Exadata customer, Cognizant decided to move its critical platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Exadata Cloud Service. Additionally, Cognizant chose to build a new data warehouse with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, which includes high-performance, row-level security that adheres to rigorous corporate security guidelines and Zero Downtime Migration by eliminating complex database administration.

Combined with Oracle Analytics Cloud, also on OCI, Cognizant gained easy-to-use data visualization dashboards and reporting to help staff analyze financial data in context.

By moving the financial data management and reporting platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Cognizant has reduced platform costs, with savings to the tune of $2.5 million over three years. The migration of terabytes of data from on-premises Oracle Exadata databases to the cloud was also seamless, and accomplished without any code changes.

Also, modernizing the data warehousing platform with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse on OCI helped Cognizant achieve significant benefits in data warehouse performance, disaster recovery capability, security, and analytics. With a dedicated Autonomous Data Warehouse service, Cognizant has an enterprise-grade database with an Oracle Exadata core for performance. Database administrators have cut database management by half, thanks to the autonomous solution’s self-management capabilities such as auto-tuning, auto-backup, and patching.

The IT team took less than a day to implement a fully automated disaster recovery service with Autonomous Data Guard. Now with a few clicks, staff can switch multiple databases from Mumbai to Hyderabad and back to Mumbai. The simple setup process took less than eight minutes, compared to several hours previously, and can be completed by a non-technical person.

The company’s security is tighter than ever with OCI networking security, including OCI Logging, Virtual Private Vault, Oracle Data Safe, and Autonomous Data Warehouse dedicated security. Cognizant has control over the encryption keys for data in the Autonomous Data Warehouse dedicated service, while the IT team has ready access to database audit data and centralized event logging with OCI.

The IT team also uses OCI Identity and Access Management to govern access management and update permissions in line with the hundreds of role changes that happen across Cognizant each week. This gives the company tight control over who has access to sensitive financial data, down to the row level.

In addition, the several thousand data platform users who rely on it for reporting appreciate the transition to Oracle Analytics Cloud compared to the previous solution. Users now have access to enterprise-grade analytics tools with a built-in enterprise business model. They can extract data and visualize it in context, allowing them to make better decisions—when and where they need to make them.