Planning a petabyte-scale cloud migration with zero customer impact sounds daunting — and Clari's VP of Engineering Infrastructure did it in three months. Balaji Narayanan breaks down the planning discipline, pre-mortem process, and cutover strategy his team used to migrate 110 databases across three regions to Google Cloud without a single customer feeling it.

This conversation covers how Balaji's team categorized every migration step as a one-way or two-way door decision, why he insists on testing the full procedure in a replicated environment before the real cutover, and how global round-the-clock coverage across India, South Africa, and the U.S. kept the project on track. This episode kicks off a three-part series on building the infrastructure foundation that makes everything else possible.

Want another story of infrastructure modernization under a tight deadline? Read how the AROYA cruise ship — the largest global cruise ship renovation to date — was modernized end-to-end across three onboard data centers in under 11 months: https://www.insight.com/en_US/content-and-resources/case-studies/it-transformation-of-the-aroya-cruise-ship.html

Start with Insight's modern infrastructure solutions: https://www.insight.com/en_US/what-we-do/expertise/modern-infrastructure.html

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Chapters

00:00 — Welcome and series introduction

02:23 — What Clari and SalesLoft do

04:52 — How to reduce unknowns before migration

06:33 — Managing the cutover moment

09:32 — Lessons learned and reversible migrations

11:31 — Scale: a petabyte, 110 databases, 3 regions

14:07 — The Insight partnership and what made it different