Advancing the Digital Transformation Journey at TIAA through Cloud Migration

Overview

The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, TIAA, is a Fortune 500 company providing various investment, retirement, and other financial services across numerous sectors – academic, research, medical, government, cultural, and other non-profit fields. TIAA has worked with people over the last 100 years to provide financial advice and create attainable long-term goals for each of its clients.

Challenge

TIAA faced challenges with its on-prem data environment due to its lack of scalability and accessibility of data for data citizens within the organization. Wanting to accelerate the development of current and future business and customer use cases, TIAA’s initial process for users to access data was unsustainable. The company’s current architecture could not sustain the influx of data ingestion and data access requests. As a result, their IT teams felt the pressure of time-consuming and repetitive data management tasks that could easily be automated to decrease processing time through an automated data catalog.

Solution

To improve the end-user experience, TIAA knew that the solution would have to push their digital transformation forward for their organization. Zaloni® was chosen for its array of capabilities that could help them attain their goal to improve end-user experience. The solution from Zaloni® involves re-platforming to modernize TIAA’s current data lake stack on an AWS cloud environment that will address the on-premises challenges of computing capacity, scalability, and accessibility to internal and external data consumers. Using AWS DataSync, Zaloni® will migrate around 22 data domains from the ‘on-prem’ environment to the Cloud environment setup within Arena as part of this initiative. This migration will allow the company to enable cloud-based security with domain-specific data access permissions. Additionally, Arena will provide an intelligent and automated data catalog of curated data that data citizens can access in a self-service manner along with automated data governance capabilities.

Result

Once TIAA re-platforms in the AWS cloud with Zaloni®’s Arena platform and migrates all data from on-prem to cloud, end-users will gain self-service access to any data, metadata, or artifacts needed to fulfill projects, use cases, or business processes. Additionally, Arena’s ability to automate data workflows and processes allows end-users to experience the flexibility and scalability of the cloud along with the accelerated processing infrastructure it provides. Ultimately, TIAA’s migration to the cloud will reduce processing costs across the board, decrease time to insight with self-service data, and provide end-users the ability to work on multiple use cases at once through automation.