Delivering Rapid Insights for Government using SAS on AWS

Butterfly Data partnered with a major UK Government client to deliver a high-performance SAS analytical platform in the cloud. Over six months, we replaced a fragmented SAS estate with a scalable, integrated infrastructure-as-a-service model hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), laying the foundation for modern analytics across five business units and over 800 users.

Challenge

The client required a secure, multi-environment deployment of both SAS Viya and SAS 9.4 on AWS. Rather than a multi-tenant SAS Grid approach, they opted for a multi-deployment architecture supporting Development, Test, Pre-Production, and Production environments.

The project needed to integrate SAS with a mix of legacy, cloud-based, and on-premise data sources, all within a highly regulated environment handling sensitive private data. With a user base spread across multiple locations and varying levels of SAS expertise, the solution also had to be intuitive, flexible, and scalable.

Solution

Butterfly Data approached the engagement holistically, considering not just the technology but also the people, processes, and organisational context. Working in an agile manner, we gathered requirements directly from business stakeholders and users, both remotely and on-site, to ensure alignment with operational needs.

Our consultants and SAS administration developed detailed low-level designs and reference architectures across all environments. We designed and implemented core platform components including CAS, Visual Analytics, reference data structures, secure data transfer, networking, and elastic scaling.

Our solution addressed both in-flight and at-rest data protection while maintaining seamless integration with existing systems. We incorporated modern DevOps tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, Artifactory, Ansible, Jira, and Confluence to align with the client's enterprise standards.

Impact

We were successful in delivering a high-performance SAS analytical platform in the cloud. This was achieved within demanding timelines and to a high standard, while remaining flexible to adapt to evolving project requirements. Time savings from both cloud scalability and code optimisation are already evident, with one example seeing the processing time of a 90Gb, 200 million row dataset reduced from two hours to just 18 seconds.

Throughout the engagement, Butterfly Data placed strong emphasis on user involvement and business transformation, not just technical delivery. User acceptance has been high, with analysts particularly enthusiastic about exploring new Viya capabilities such as Visual Analytics and spatial mapping, which make it easier to interpret results quickly.

As SAS subject matter experts, we worked alongside the client's DevOps team during the deployment of SAS Viya for five business areas. Each group had different levels of familiarity with legacy SAS tools, and integration timelines varied due to security approvals. To manage this complexity, we adopted an agile rollout strategy, enabling dev/test access for a small group of trailblazer users in each tenant to ensure steady progress and early feedback.
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