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 QlikView products to Qlik Cloud. These recommendations consider 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 that can be shifted to Qlik Cloud or potentially eliminated.

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 to support with our data and analytics platform?

Preparation and implementation

New features and capabilities in Qlik Cloud mean that approaches, techniques, and features leveraged in QlikView 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. Some tasks have dependencies while others like QlikView application conversion and refactoring can be run in parallel. The duration of each step in a migration will vary depending on the complexity of the existing QlikViewdeployment.

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

Note that the Application conversion process begins early in the overall process. This is to allow time to review the results of the converter tool, get the newly created Qlik Sense app to the cloud and complete the visualization design and connectivity.

The migration documentation for QlikView focuses primarily on tasks in the Process and Setup 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, groups, roles, and authorizations

Security and governance

Authentication and authorization

By default, a new Qlik Cloud tenant is configured against a Qlik Account, the default 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

Qlik Cloud uses an approach where 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

QlikView 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 data connections for your 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:

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

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.

Moving QlikView content to Qlik Cloud: concepts and best practices

Document assessment

Your migration strategy should include an assessment of your QlikView documents. This can help you to decide whether to:

• Retire the document.
• Migrate the document to a Qlik Cloud app.

Consider the following:

• Is a document providing business value? Consider how often the document is used, how many people are using it, and who is using it. A document that is used by only one person may still be critical if it is being used to make important business decisions.

• Is a document nearing the end of its life cycle? Are the insights it provides still valuable? If so, development effort could be used instead to rescope and build a new Qlik Cloud app.

Document assessment tools:

• The QlikView Governance Dashboard provides visibility into QlikView deployments. The dashboard displays information including recurring labels and expressions, complexity analysis, file size, usage frequency, and data lineage. The Sense Profile Score scores QlikView apps for compatibility with Qlik Sense and thus with Qlik Cloud as well.

  For more information, see QlikView Governance Dashboard.

QlikView and Qlik Cloud functional assessment

Consider the following:

• What functional improvements in Qlik Cloud support your organization goals? For example, Qlik Cloud makes it easier for all members of your organization to develop and share insights.

• What functionality in QlikView is not or not yet supported in Qlik Cloud? Is there a reasonable workaround when the functionality is not supported?

QlikView and Qlik Cloud developer and consumer assessment

Consider the following:

• The Cloud is a very different but powerful new experience for consumers. Many new features are available to empower, automate and enhance their analysis. Acclimating them to this great new environment is key to success. The self-service capabilities for consumers can be leveraged to minimize development tasks from skilled developers.

• The development process is also very different. Training developers prior to app conversion will prepare them for new features and techniques to add value to their work.

Qlik Sense Desktop as conversion tool

Qlik Sense Desktop will be utilized to access the Dev Hub and run the QlikView converter to create a Qlik Sense application for review and migration.

You can download Qlik Sense Desktop and authenticate with your cloud tenant via the Setting and Management under your profile settings. For more information, see Get started with Qlik Sense Desktop.

Once you have the Qlik Sense Desktop installed you can access the Dev Hub via the profile icon. From the Dev Hub you will run the converter and create a Qlik Sense application from the results. Upload the application to the cloud or migrate several with the Qlik CLI script.

Doing all your next level of design and refactoring in the cloud will allow you to leverage all the features of Qlik Cloud Analytics and test your new data connections.

For conversion examples, see:

• Example: Moving QlikView content to Qlik Sense using the QlikView converter

• Example: Manually recreating QlikView content in Qlik Sense