Moving from safe, time-tested legacy systems to the cloud is scary. But it’s a journey that businesses have to take to stay relevant in the new digital economy. A successful digital transformation is dependent on many factors, but one critical basis is the actual transfer of data.

Or, as Chris Degnan (pictured, left), chief revenue officer of Snowflake Inc., puts it: “How the heck are we going to get data into the cloud?”

Answering this question and more, Degnan and Anthony Brooks-Williams (pictured, right), chief executive officer of HVR Software Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed the challenges businesses face migrating data into the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

It’s time to migrate or be left behind

Five years ago, financial companies wouldn’t even consider moving secure data into the cloud. But the demands of customers used to fast, customized service has meant that some companies have had to eat their words.

Back then, Degnan approached one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street to explain the benefits of moving to a cloud-based as a service model. The bank was impressed but wanted to know if Snowflake could provide the same services on-premises. According to Degnan, Snowflake’s founder, Benoit Dageville responded: “You will run on the public cloud before we ever run in the private cloud.”

His prediction came true. Today, that company is one of Snowflake’s biggest customers, according to Degnan. “We’re seeing financial services move at a blistering pace to the cloud,” he stated.

Snowflake and HVR partner to smooth the move to cloud

Snowflake and HVR work in conjunction to offer low impact, real-time data transfer — “like refueling the plane in mid-air,” Vellante said.

HVR “helps move the data”– offering live data integration to enable companies to efficiently move data into the cloud, Brooks-Williams explained. Snowflake offers the elasticity required for modern data warehouse management.

“Being a service makes [moving data] easy,” Degnan stated. There are a fixed amount of resources with on-premises data warehouses, while the flexibility of cloud means the ability to scale up and down as required, he added.

Customers also have the choice of speed; if they want to take it slow, migration can occur invisibly in the background. However, for those in a hurry, a complete migration from on-premises to Snowflake can be done in a matter of months.

“We have a Fortune 100 customer who literally had an on-premise data system that they moved to Snowflake in 111 days,” Degnan said.

The ability to use HVR for high-volume data replication from traditional SAP systems into Snowflake has led to many migration success stories, according to Brooks-Williams. He cites online floral delivery service 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. and business services grandfather Pitney Bowes Inc. as examples.

Pitney Bowes “had some stringent performance loads other vendors couldn’t meet,” he stated. “But between both our companies we were able to solve that challenge for them and move this data at scale in the performance that they needed out of these Oracle’s SQL server environments into Snowflake.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: HVR Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HVR Software nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE