Planning your migration to Qlik Cloud

When planning your migration to Qlik Cloud, review Qlik's recommended considerations, best practices, and approach, as well as the resources available throughout the process, to ensure a successful transition from Qlik Sense Client-Managed products to Qlik Cloud. These recommendations take into account the knowledge and experiences gained from Qlik customers as they migrate to Qlik Cloud.

Begin your migration with an assessment and evaluation of your organization’s:

1. Strategic direction—Approach the migration to Qlik Cloud as a strategic initiative. Align the project with future business needs and the long-term direction of your organization’s cloud, data, and analytics strategies.

2. Preparation and Implementation—Detail the considerations required, the key main steps to prepare for, and the best practice approach to implementation.

3. Optimization— Establish mechanisms to measure and manage your Qlik Cloud deployment to help drive adoption.

Reviewing these key areas ensures that you can maximize success while minimizing migration costs.

Strategic direction

Keep your organization's strategic plans in mind when migrating to Qlik Cloud. This helps to identify both migration priorities and existing initiatives to be sunset. Consider some of the following questions:

• What are our strategic goals in moving to Qlik Cloud?

• What is our current cloud data architecture?

• Where are our operational systems being hosted?

• What initiatives will our organization need of its data and analytics platform?

• Are there past implementations that do not address future business needs?

Preparation and implementation

New features and capabilities in Qlik Cloud mean that approaches, techniques, and features leveraged in Qlik Sense Client-Managed products might be different in Qlik Cloud. A cloud-based solution is architecturally different to a client-managed one, reimagining and refactoring should be considered to optimize the benefits of Qlik Cloud. Therefore, to optimize your analytics experience with Qlik, migration needs to go beyond a lift and shift from on-premises to Qlik Cloud. Once you identify your strategic goals, the next steps are to address the fundamental migration activities.

Understanding the migration workflow and timeline

Your specific migration approach and process will depend on your current landscape, resources, and requirements. This section provides a general outline of the migration workflow. Use it as a guideline to help you understand the timing and sequence of events during a migration, for example, which tasks can be run in parallel and when to move users and create spaces. The duration of each step in a migration will vary depending on the complexity of the existing Qlik Sense Client-Managed deployment.

The following example workflow categorizes migration steps according to the type of task—Process, Setup, or Assets. Tasks are aligned according to where they fit in the migration sequence.

The migration documentation for Qlik Sense Client-Managed focuses primarily on tasks in the Setup and Assets workflows. This includes setting up the cloud tenant and migration tools, and then using these tools to help manage the migration of users and content, such as streams, apps, and data connections, to Qlik Cloud.

For more information, see:

• Deploying the Qlik Cloud tenant

• Setting up the Qlik Cloud migration tools

• Migrating users and content

Security and governance

Authentication and authorization

By default, a new Qlik Cloud tenant is configured against Qlik Account, the Qlik identity provider, which requires that any users register accounts with Qlik before they can log in. However, the best practice is to use an external identity provider within the existing Qlik deployment (for example, Active Directory).

The benefits of using your own identity provider include the ability to:

• Allow access to the platform using existing corporate credentials, without having to create and manage a Qlik Account.

• Enforce your own polices for password length, password expiration, and multi-factor authentication.

• Audit and monitor access in line with your IT security and governance requirements.

• Federate multiple directories if required.

• Include a user’s group assignments through the identity provider.

• Automatically handle users joining and leaving and control how user IDs are managed for space security and section access.

Roles and rules

In Qlik Sense Client-Managed, the concept of rules is used for configuring and enforcing security, license allocation, app distribution, and more. The flexibility of the rules engine can be augmented by custom properties to create complicated authorization patterns. The Qlik Cloud platform does not implement security rules in this manner and does not have custom properties. Instead, Qlik Cloud uses a simpler approach whereby security is designed to be assigned directly to groups, or to users where groups are not available through the identity provider

Qlik Cloud permissions may be set at the space level (for applications and data), or system level (for administrative roles), and both support group assignment. This approach requires some organization-specific planning. While this approach can be implemented before migration, it is recommended that you review this design against the new roles and capabilities in Qlik Cloud before starting migration activities.

Rationalize and streamline your current Qlik deployment

Qlik Sense Client-Managed customers often find that they have many legacy applications, some of which may no longer be required (such as in development and test environments). Streamlining the current environment by archiving old, duplicate, or unused applications can significantly reduce the effort (and cost) of migrating to Qlik Cloud, and minimize ongoing maintenance and testing overheads.

The following approach is a best-practice technique to rationalize and streamline your Qlik deployment:

• For Production apps: Request that the application owners confirm resources to test the application after migration, or to state the application can be retired (Opt-out).

• For Development and Test apps: Request that application owners provide a list of apps that are required to be migrated (Opt-in).

• For all apps that do not require migration: Export and archive to long term storage outside the Qlik deployment.

Accessing your data

The location of your organization's data must be considered in the migration plan to Qlik Cloud. Qlik Cloud has several connectors that can access many publicly addressable data sources. Therefore, if your organization has moved to supported cloud-based systems (such as Salesforce or Workday), cloud databases (such as Snowflake for Google Big Query), or cloud storage (such as AWS S3 or Azure block storage), then it will be straightforward to move applications. Many organizations have data sources that are on premises, cannot be made accessible to the public internet, or require use of the customer’s specifically structured connectors. In these cases, there are several tools and approaches to make this data available to Qlik Cloud.

These are the current options for making your data available to Qlik Cloud:

• Qlik Data Gateway - Direct Access – directly access your private data in Qlik Cloud

• Moving your data to a supported cloud DB or Storage – then pull into Qlik Cloud

• Directly connect to supported source systems from Qlik Cloud – pull into Qlik Cloud

These technologies and techniques may be used to implement or integrate with your strategic cloud data architecture. It is common practice to use short-term tactical options while transitioning to the strategic long-term goal of a cloud data architecture.

Qlik Data Gateway – Direct Access

Qlik Data Gateway extends Qlik Data Services to customer’s data, regardless of location — on-premises, virtual private cloud, or public cloud. The gateway enables direct access using a secured and dedicated tunnel, without opening ports in customer's firewalls, directly to Qlik Cloud and other popular cloud targets like Snowflake, Azure Synapse, Google Big Query, or Databricks.

Directly connect to your source systems from Qlik Cloud

This option is most commonly used where you have moved to cloud-based systems such as Salesforce or Workday. Qlik Cloud can connect to these systems through Qlik connectors, or you can build integrations with these systems using Qlik Application Automation. Using this method to connect to on-premises sources is not recommended, as it requires the organization’s firewall to be opened.