Data migration has become an essential, unavoidable task for making use of emerging technologies and the needs of the growing organization. But most of the time, the data migration projects, however planned carefully and executed diligently, leads to cost and time overruns and refuse to move ahead as planned.
This leads to difficult situations in the business activities’ day-to-day running, putting the Company and your customers in difficult situations for a long time to come.
To avoid these pitfalls while migrating your data to a new data management system, we can follow some essential steps and avoid all the headaches associated with an improperly managed data migration. The steps for your successful data migration are here irrespective of whether you are doing the one-off Big- Bang all-around migration or going for a bit- at-a time trickle migration.
Different Kinds of Data Migration:
Database Migration: If you would like to update the present database or move the data from 1 database engine to the next, then you have to organize the database migration. This procedure modifies just information, not the schema. It requires careful preparation, and analyzing a database is an essential part of a system.
Storage Migration: Mainly concentrates on transferring the information from 1 device to another within assumptions (such as on hard disk) or around the cloud. It’s by far the most straightforward migration procedure where attributes like data analysis, cloning, and eliminating corrupt data are employed. It provides scalable performance at lower prices.
Application Migration: It’s almost the combo of storage intrusion and database migration. It’s implemented as soon as an organization moves from 1 platform or seller application to another where the OS, management applications, and virtual machine configurations may differ in the time of advancement and installation.
Cloud Migration: When you execute cloud migration, partial or all data of your company assets, software, management applications, services, and settings are moved into the cloud system. It guarantees storage scalability, cost-effectiveness, firewall protection, and effortless accessibility to this information to the power staff.
Data migration is a complex and cumbersome process requiring more effort, and it has to be done after very careful planning with proper allocation of resources and application of the best migration management practices and some of the most important among them are as follows:
Step 1: Data Analysis
Data is the backbone of your business, and it must be available to all the users in and out of your organization after the migration as it did before the migration.
Due to the complexity of the migration process, the possibility of facing issues is high. Hence, you need to plan for every possible eventuality and must have corrective solutions and exit paths ready on hand to meet the eventualities.
Before starting the migration process, undertake a deep analysis of the nature of the data, the process of migration, the type of storage, and the way of data storage, processing, and manipulation at the new location.
This will help you understand the data migration process well and be prepared for any issues that may arise during the migration process.
Step 2: Arrive At and Set Up the Right Data Standards
Before starting the data migration process, always strive hard to device suitable data standards to pin-point the possible problem areas before the issues arise. This will help you avoid the situation of dealing with multiple issues during the migration affecting the smooth transition of data.
Due to your data’s constantly changing state, establishing the right data standards helps your data migration team find and put in place data definitions for easy data consolidation for easy storage, manipulation, and use of data within your organization.
Step 3: Put In Place the Right Data Governance Roles
Before the migration process, tone up your data management set up and demarcates the teams’ roles and responsibilities involved in the migration process. They must be given suitable access rights and be controlled by suitable levels of accountability.
This ensures the teams take the right steps and go on with the migration process without affecting the data’s quality and usability during and after the migration. The entire migration process must be under a specially constituted team vested with powers to control and assign responsibilities for different entities engaged in the migration process.
Step 4: Ensure High Data Quality
A successful Data migration should be planned in such a way that there is no loss in quality of the data, and it must be ensured that the movement of data does not cause any unwanted changes in the data configuration or data structure, leading to new and unexpected problems while accessing the data at the new location.
For this, do a thorough data quality check and identify the quality of the data and provide the necessary filters and firewalls to prevent the entry of any malware or other irritants into the data system. This will provide clean and usable data in the same structure as it existed before the migration.
Step 5: Analyse Critical Data Migration Risks
when starting the data migration process, always establish the degree of complexity and the required quality levels of the data structure. After this, you have to put in place all the data usage rules and standards of usage to put in the best possible data governance rules in place.
Once this is done, the migration can be affected with a clear view of how the data will be used by whom and in what way, and it will give a great success to the entire data migration process.
Step 6: Deploy The Right Tools For Data Migration
Data migration is a too technical and too complex process that requires the right tools to accomplish trouble-free successful migration. So, do your research and find the right tools that support your existing infrastructure as well as support the process you are undertaking now.
The tools you use must be the best fit for the data environment in which they will be used and must also be flexible enough to fit the skills of the people operating it and in no way limit the migration process. You have to find the flexible, scalable tools and require minimum technical expertise so that it can be successfully deployed and operated for successful data migration.
Step 7: Be Ready With A Risk Management System
Almost all the data migration process leads to some degree of data loss, and to mitigate the effects of unexpected data loss, you must run a test migration process to assess the risk parameters expected during the migration and provide for right corrective measures.
Always proceed with ad-hoc deployment tools to back up the data, place the right settings, and manage the entire migration process through a centralized migration system to have better-unified control over the migration process.
Thus, follow these essential steps before setting in motion your data migration process and ensure that the tools you are using are reliable and ensure that the data system you are creating at your new location can fulfill the data handling needs of the present as well as that of the future.
Relevant Resources:
What Is ITAD and How Does It Work
The Path to AWS Cloud Starts With Data Restoration and Migration Best Practices
