CASE STUDY | APPRECIATION ENGINE
Appreciation Engine
Modernizing Customer Analytics Through a Secure AWS Migration
INDUSTRY
Customer Insights
Cloud Migration
Data Architecture
Governance
SOLUTION AREA
AWS DocumentDB
AWS DMS
Lambda
CloudFormation
KMS
TECHNOLOGY
The Challenge
Appreciation Engine (AE) is a global customer engagement analytics company that processes real-time user behavior signals across websites and social platforms. Serving more than 125 enterprise clients, the company needed an infrastructure foundation capable of scaling alongside its rapidly growing customer base.
Historically, AE relied on a fragmented mix of infrastructure services, including running their primary MongoDB workloads on Rackspace. This led to rising operational complexity, latency issues, and increasing data egress costs. A previous attempt to migrate workloads to AWS EC2-hosted MongoDB had failed due to implementation complexity, leaving the team cautious about another move.
With demand growing and customer expectations high, AE’s leadership required a secure, resilient, and fully cloud-native solution that improved performance—and most importantly, enabled their internal team to manage the environment independently post-migration.
The Data Elephant Difference
Data Elephant was selected as AE’s trusted AWS partner to design and execute a scalable migration strategy that balanced technical excellence with enablement. The focus was not just on moving 1.1 TB of production data into AWS – but on empowering AE to confidently run and evolve the environment long after the engagement ended.
Our approach emphasized cloud-native best practices, strict security, and predictable automation through Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Unified Data Foundations by implementing Unity Catalog for centralized security, lineage, and metadata within Azure Databricks
Connected Governance Framework that aligned Collibra’s governance capabilities with the technical controls in Databricks and Microsoft Fabric
Trusted Analytics through consistent data definitions and standardized KPIs in Power BI
Embedded Stewardship by establishing clear ownership and stewardship roles tied to business domains
Lean Delivery with a small, high-impact team focused on enabling results quickly
The Outcome
The migration delivered immediate and long-term value for Appreciation Engine, transforming both their data platform and their operational model.
Results at a Glance
FASTER VALUE
Governance results realized in under 8 weeks
VISIBILITY & TRUST
End-to-end data lineage through Unity Catalog and Collibra
RELIABLE INSIGHTS
Consistent definitions powering trusted Power BI reporting
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE
Roles, processes, and tools embedded across the enterprise
