From cost center to value provider: How TELUS’ IT teams use Google Cloud to boost revenue

Featured in this video: Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS Executive summary: Aside from supporting more than 20 million customer telecommunications connections across Canada, TELUS operates in 32 countries through its Digital, Health, and Agriculture business units. But to conduct these large-scale operations, the TELUS teams need to quickly and securely access and collaborate on accurate data. The company used to work in silos, leveraging multiple on-premises data centers which resulted in unreliable, duplicate information in its data lakes. A migration to Google Cloud brought TELUS’ teams closer together with one source of truth and helped reach its goal to generate millions of dollars through smarter use of data insights and self-serve AI. Challenge: In November 2021, TELUS lacked a solid data foundation to drive analytics and AI at scale across the company. At the time, several teams relied on on-premises services and created their own data silos. The company also had two large on-premises data platforms and a High-Performance Business Intelligence relational database, but teams lacked a unified data governance strategy. The result was duplicate data across multiple platforms and a lot of confusion. TELUS needed a single source of truth to use its data efficiently and drive real business outcomes. Reliability concerns and the cost of maintenance of these disparate solutions led the TELUS team to seek an alternative, and that’s when it found Google Cloud. Solution: Since then, TELUS has modernized its infrastructure by adopting BigQuery as its enterprise data hub with self-serve analytics. The migration entailed connecting 6,000 dags, more than 200 data pipelines, and up to 14 Petabytes of structured customer information stored across 100 different source systems into BigQuery. TELUS teams now have a more reliable source of information in a fast and secure work environment. Result: Instead of a lift-and-shift migration, TELUS use