Ep 4. From On-Prem to Cloud (Again): How a Government Agency Made the Big Bang Work

What do you do when GDPR forces your cloud project to stop—and years later, you need to go back? In this episode, Niels Melotte, Data Engineer at Dataminded, unpacks the journey of a government agency that migrated from the cloud to on-prem and then back to the cloud again.

And here’s the kicker: the Big Bang migration only took 14 hours. No downtime. No data loss. No angry users.

🔍 In this episode, we discuss:

• Schrems II and why it sent European governments off the cloud

• AWS Nitro Enclaves & external key management for GDPR compliance

• Why the on-prem platform failed to meet uptime guarantees

• What “purpose-based access control” means and why it matters

• The value of standardizing with dbt and Starburst

• How data product thinking shaped the migration strategy

• Lessons learned about trust, stakeholder communication, and platform maturity

This isn’t a fluffy case study. It’s a practical guide full of engineering tradeoffs, real-world headaches, and long-term lessons. A must-listen for data leaders, engineers, architects, and anyone dealing with sensitive data and complex infrastructure decisions.

🎧 Want more episodes?Watch or Listen to all episodes of The Data Playbook on Spotify: 👉 https://open.spotify.com/show/78z3kdyBSKiURz1VnTVP9l?si=781abec722264306

Show notes, episodes & resources:👉 https://www.dataminded.com/resources/podcast

#CloudMigration #PublicSector #GDPR #DataGovernance #AWS #DataPlatform #dbt #Starburst #BigBangMigration #TheDataPlaybook #Dataminded