A Modern, Governed Data Platform for Sommet Education's Financial Operations

With ELCA's expertise, Sommet Education is migrating its critical financial data integration from an ageing on-premise Talend platform to a modern, cloud-native architecture on Microsoft Fabric - laying the foundations for a secure, auditable, and fully automated platform for the group's finance operations. ELCA designed the solution, helped the team understand the basics of Fabric and the different options, and is supporting the team through the build; the platform is currently in development, ahead of its planned go-live. 

As a fast-growing international education group, Sommet Education needed its finance operations to keep pace with the business — but its data foundation was holding it back. Financial data arrives daily from multiple banking and payment partners and must be checked and entered into the group's finance system before the team can close the books and meet regulatory deadlines. Today, the existing Talend processes run faster and are being stabilised, but the setup still depends on a single, ageing computer with no backup, sensitive access is managed manually, and the lack of a clear trail between bank files and posted entries makes every audit slow. Each new data source meant weeks of costly custom development, limiting the finance team's ability to keep up with the group's growth. 

Leveraging its data architecture expertise, ELCA designed the new data platform for Sommet Education and is accompanying the team through its development, replacing the legacy system with Microsoft Fabric. In the target design, incoming data moves through three clear stages - raw, cleaned, and ready-to-use - giving Sommet Education a single, automated pipeline covering banking transactions, payment data, and finance system records. File transfers are automated, access to sensitive data is securely and centrally controlled, and every piece of data keeps a full history, so that any figure in a report will be traceable back to its source. The connection to the group's finance system runs in the background, keeping existing processes intact, and the platform can be reliably reproduced and updated across development, testing, and live environments. The solution is currently in the development phase and 2 flows are in production. 

Under the hood, the platform follows a Medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) on Microsoft Fabric OneLake, with Delta tables providing versioning and full audit history, and secrets managed through Azure Key Vault. Infrastructure is defined as code with Terraform and deployed via Azure DevOps across separate dev, test, and production environments, with a Zero-Trust security model enforcing role-based and data-level access control throughout.

Once fully deployed, the migration is expected to bring benefits across all teams. Data engineering moves to a fully managed cloud platform that scales automatically, with monitored, self-correcting data flows. Finance receives validated, ready-to-use data with full traceability from raw bank files to posted journal entries. IT security and compliance gain strong, centrally managed protection of sensitive data, while management benefits from predictable, transparent costs and consistent, repeatable deployments. 

The approach used for Sommet Education addresses a challenge common to organisations still running older, on-premises data integration tools with a dependency on external file transfers and a finance or ERP system. Its three-stage design is industry-agnostic, applying equally to healthcare, public sector reporting, logistics, or retail - anywhere structured files arrive from external partners and need to reach a core business system. For organisations considering Microsoft Fabric, this ongoing project already offers a concrete, real-world blueprint covering data collection, transformation, delivery, and governance.