Six months after taking our shiny new enterprise health data warehouse live on a “safe bet,” traditional, on-premises data warehousing platform, we were mired in performance, stability, and maintenance issues. In desperation we kicked off a stealth-mode pilot project to measure the capabilities of Google Cloud Platform — especially BigQuery — against the on-premises system.

Three months later we walked away from our original investment, completed a full migration to Google Cloud, and have never looked back.

I get asked all the time how we did it. If you’d like an in-person deep dive, it will be the subject of my speaking session at Google Cloud Next this month. Or you can listen to the whole story here as I told it a couple years ago. There’s drama. Politics. Steak (or not). It’s a wonder I didn’t lose my job.

But over time I’ve come to realize that much of the why came down to the data on just two slides: