Databricks Lakehouse Assessment
Has your organisation migrated to Databricks but is struggling to unlock the full potential of your lakehouse?
Are you confident your platform is built on the right foundations for scalability, security, and long-term value?
Many organisations have successfully adopted a lakehouse architecture but find that inconsistent practices, increasing complexity, governance challenges, and manual processes prevent them from achieving the outcomes they expected.
Our Databricks Lakehouse Assessment helps you understand where your platform aligns with Databricks and industry best practices, identify areas for improvement, and create a clear roadmap to mature your lakehouse operations.
Why a Databricks Lakehouse Assessment?
Moving to a lakehouse architecture is a significant transformation. It changes how organisations manage data, infrastructure, security and delivery processes.
Without the right foundations, organisations can experience:
- Rising platform costs due to inefficient workloads and compute management
- Governance and security gaps that increase risk
- Inconsistent architecture that limits scalability
- Manual deployment processes that slow delivery
- Skills gaps that make it harder to maximise the platform’s value
Our assessment provides an independent view of your current Databricks environment, helping you understand what is working well, where risks exist, and what improvements will deliver the greatest impact.
We Help Answer The Key Questions:
Are we following Databricks best practices?
We assess your current lakehouse architecture, processes, and platform configuration against recognised best practices to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Are we set up to scale securely?
We review your approach to security, governance, infrastructure, and permissions to ensure your platform can support future growth.
Are we getting the most value from our investment?
We identify opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce unnecessary complexity, and enable faster delivery of business value.
How do we continue to mature our lakehouse?
We provide a prioritised improvement plan and roadmap to help your organisation move from migration to optimisation.
Our Databricks Lakehouse Assessment is a focused 1–2 week engagement led by an experienced Databricks architect with broad platform and solution architecture expertise.
How The Assessment Works
The assessment combines stakeholder discussions with a detailed review of your existing platform, documentation, and processes.
We engage key stakeholders to understand the context behind your lakehouse adoption, the value cases you are targeting, and the challenges you have encountered.
We typically speak with:
Head of Data
Understanding the rationale for adopting Databricks, the journey so far, key business objectives, and where the organisation wants to go next.
Product Managers
Understanding how data supports products and where improvements to the platform could enable new capabilities.
Data Team Leads
Assessing the current technology landscape, team capability, and key platform challenges.
Data Teams
Gathering practical insights from those working with the platform day-to-day and understanding operational pain points.
What We Assess
We assess six critical areas of lakehouse maturity to understand how aligned your Databricks environment is to best practices.
Data Architecture
We review how your data architecture is structured and governed, including:
- Documentation and architectural alignment
- Medallion architecture implementation
- Unity Catalog structure
- Table optimisations, types and settings
Platform Processes
We assess how effectively your platform is managed and operated, including:
- Cluster sizing, types and policies
- Pipeline setup and monitoring
- Backup and recovery approaches
- Data ingestion methodologies
Solution Architecture
We review the technical foundations of your lakehouse environment, including:
- Solution architecture documentation
- Network security
- Storage account configuration
- Databricks workspace settings
Security
We assess governance and access controls, including:
- Data masking approaches
- Data tags and PII management
- Access grants
- Groups and permissions
DevOps
We review delivery processes and automation maturity, including:
- Documentation
- Release processes
- Asset bundle usage
- Manual interventions and deployment practices
Skills
We assess the capability available within your organisation, including:
- Team availability
- Breadth of platform knowledge
- Depth of technical expertise
The Assessment Process
The core of the assessment focuses on understanding your existing lakehouse environment and identifying gaps against best practices.
This includes reviewing:
- Data architecture, solution architecture, and release documentation to understand platform maturity
- Foundational data components, including catalog structures, access controls, and table properties
- Compute configuration and workload alignment to support performance and cost efficiency
- Infrastructure configuration and environmental segregation
- Data tagging, governance policies, and access controls based on least privilege principles
- Integration and deployment processes, including automation levels and manual intervention points
What You’ll Receive
At the end of the assessment, you will have a clear understanding of your current lakehouse maturity and the steps needed to improve.
You will receive:
A Current State Assessment Report
A concise report outlining how your Databricks lakehouse aligns with Databricks and industry best practices, highlighting key strengths and improvement areas.
A Prioritised Improvement Plan
A set of scoped initiatives focused on improving maturity across the six core assessment areas.
A Lakehouse Improvement Roadmap
A practical roadmap based on agreed priorities, helping your organisation implement improvements and continue its Databricks journey.
Why a Databricks Lakehouse Assessment?
Your Databricks investment should enable faster delivery, better governance, and greater business value.
Our assessment helps you:
For Your Business
- Reduce platform risks and operational complexity
- Optimise your Databricks investment
- Improve governance and security
- Accelerate delivery of business use cases
- Build confidence in your lakehouse foundations
For Your Teams
- Reduce manual effort and inefficiencies
- Improve engineering practices and automation
- Remove platform blockers
- Build confidence and capability across teams
- Create a clearer path for future improvements
For Your Leaders
- Gain visibility into platform maturity
- Understand where investment is needed
- Prioritise improvements based on business value
- Reduce uncertainty around your lakehouse roadmap
- Create confidence that your Databricks platform is built for the future
Move beyond migration. Build a secure, scalable and high-performing lakehouse.
Our Databricks Lakehouse Assessment provides the insight, priorities, and roadmap needed to maximise the value of your platform and continue your transformation journey.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Book a free discovery call to discuss your challenges and see how an assessment can help.
