Migrating a Multisite environment to Tableau Cloud

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On their data journey to become a truly data driven parts specialist & e-commerce player, TVH collects more data than ever before.

And with the overall company strategy moving to the cloud…
their entire Tableau environment had to make the move to the cloud too.

Parts specialist TVH is a global player in the field of parts and accessories for lift trucks, industrial vehicles, construction and agricultural machinery. They operate from 90 branches across all continents and offer 47 million item numbers.

Why TVH wanted to migrate to Tableau Cloud

Becoming a leading organisation in the marketplace, requires TVH to enable faster, smarter decision-making in a scalable way. A cloud-first strategy throughout the organisation drives digital transformation on a daily basis, allowing TVH to further streamline the business and become more efficient.

Data as a cornerstone

With a user base of 2.500 and up to 2.000 workbooks - ranging from global management reporting to process specific data insights and ad-hoc self-serve data consumption - data is used in every corner of the organisation.

Tableau as the main pillar of analytics

On their data journey to become a truly data driven parts specialist & e-commerce player, TVH collects more data than ever before. Tableau has been chosen as the enterprise-grade data insights and analytics platform.

Fast, secure cloud migration

Migrating to Tableau Cloud fits the overall cloud-first strategy, and would ultimately accelerate TVH’s data journey towards a higher level of data maturity.
And that’s where TabMove came in.

Tableau cloud migration challenges for TVH

What were the migration challenges?

Moving to Tableau Cloud would provide TVH with a trouble-free, high performing SAAS solution that automatically provides new features, ensures scalability and implements the latest security measures.

At first, TVH considered a manual / semi-automatic migration to Tableau Cloud with the use of the Tableau Content Migration Tool but both did not pass even the simplest test. They main challenges were:

Multisite migration

Moving a multisite environment with 2.500 users, 450 data sources, 2.000 workbooks and a hierarchy of 250 projects is no easy job. It requires an automatic migration.

Migration complexity

Apart from migrating data sources and workbooks - configuration settings, users, groups, projects should be included in the migration to Tableau Cloud as well. Ideally, even subscriptions and scheduled jobs would automatically be configured on the Tableau Cloud environment too.

Google BigQuery & Sheets data sources

An additional complexity of this cloud migration was the requirement to deal with Google BigQuery and Google Sheet data sources, single-sign-on credentials, embedded Tableau credentials and migration of AD usernames to user email address (authentication).

"TabMove made the impossible (manually migrating 2.000 workbooks from Tableau server to Tableau cloud) possible. It is a top migration tool, fast and reliable, and thanks to Biztory's excellent technical expertise, our migration project succeeded smoothly and in a cost and time-efficient way !

Marc Vermeulen, TVH

The Process

1. Cloud Migration Discovery

TVH needed a Cloud Migration approach that could meet their needs based migration complexity and speed. During a first free discovery we ran TVH through a series of questions and came up with a high-level estimation on the cloud migration effort with TabMove.

2. TabMove Simulation

During a deep dive audit and fully remote workshop, we got hands-on access to TVH's team and server environments. While applying our proven methodology, we ran a final dry-run of our TabMove solution, simulating the full scope of TVH's migration to Tableau Cloud.

3. Migrating to Tableau Cloud

Once agreed on the full scope and our delivery model during the simulation, it was time for the official migration to Tableau Cloud.
Here, the migration squad supported TabMove as the solution for the move from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud.

Tableau cloud migration with Tabmove for TVH

With a simple 4-step approach, TabMove was the only Tableau Cloud migration tool robust enough to handle the job, including the capability to deal with the complexity of Google BigQuery, Google Sheets data sources and more.

During a testing period of 4 weeks, TVH & Biztory executed a series of migration runs, gradually improving migration quality - number of objects successfully migrated - to 100%. The actual migration took place on a Friday, was completed end-of-day, enabling the full user base to switch to the new Tableau cloud sites.