Praveena Edward Panneer Selvam

Simplifying infrastructure accelerates data work and drives outcomes. The future of analytics isn’t about managing clusters; it’s about empowering users with seamless, scalable compute. In this session, Nationwide and Databricks share a real-world journey from server-managed infrastructure to Databricks Serverless, covering all-purpose compute, jobs compute, and SQL warehouses. We show how serverless simplified operations, sped up development cycles, reduced cost variability, and improved the user experience. We highlight the biggest wins, explore key design decisions that shaped success, and close with practical best practices to help your organization confidently accelerate its move to serverless.

This talk takes you through the Nationwide Security and Infrastructure data team's journey of migrating from HMS to UC. Discover how HMS federation simplified our transition to UC, allowing for an incremental migration that minimized disruption to data consumers while optimizing our data layout. We’ll share the key technical decisions, challenges faced and lessons learned along the way. The migration process wasn’t without its hurdles, so we’ll walk you through our detailed, step-by-step approach covering planning, execution and validation. We will also showcase the benefits realized, such as improved data governance, more efficient data access and enhanced operational performance. Join us to gain practical insights into executing complex data migrations with a focus on security, flexibility and long-term scalability.