GDPR: Converting SAS jobs to data movement operations in Azure

GDPR: Converting SAS jobs to data movement operations in Azure

Challenge

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European data privacy law with stringent requirements designed to protect the privacy of European citizens living in Europe and abroad. 

In order to comply with GDPR, a major insurance provider needed to update the way they moved and processed data. In the past, this insurance provider wrote code in SAS to move data from place to place.  SAS code executions were inefficient and resulted in long wait periods. Worse still, the SAS platform made it impossible to trace each step SAS code performs, making it challenging to document all changes to the data for GDPR and data tracing requirements. To make matters worse, not only was moving data and documenting changes for GDPR compliance a time-consuming and inefficient process, but licensing costs for SAS proved exorbitant for the provider.