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Data Migration Tips and Best Practices
Craig Yellick, VP Business Solutions
Data migration is a critical phase of moving to the cloud, never go it alone.
Data Migration: One Step of a Challenging, Ongoing Process
Businesses just like yours are in a race to adopt new practices and new technologies. This is an effort to not only stay competitive, but to ensure profitability in the future. With more and more companies expanding their abilities to work from home, they find they need to make their data more accessible to remote employees, some of whom may be using different devices.
Data migration is nothing to take lightly. Even small companies can have millions of records of data across multiple systems which can make a seemingly simple task complicated and time-consuming. In fact, projects of this nature are notorious for budget and schedule overruns and there are plenty of reasons for this:
- Leaving migrations to later in the process instead of at the beginning
- Complex source data
- Lost or corrupt data
- Hidden testing and validation needs
- Temporary technology solutions that have morphed into permanent ones
Whether your plan is to move all your data at once, or if you prefer a phased approach, the most important thing to consider is whether you have the expertise to migrate your data correctly.
This is why any company that is moving their data to the cloud needs to take an honest assessment of their own capabilities and time constraints and in most cases they will find they need a professional IT company that is well versed in cloud services and has guided many companies through this critical period. This blog will explore the best practices when moving your data to the cloud and how Blue Net is well-positioned to be the IT provider that can make your cloud migration a simple reality.
Data Migration Best Practices
- Analyze all data, determine the scope, and establish a plan. Not everything needs to be moved, and the less you plan to move the better. Data migration projects will always have issues, even for companies that have impeccable data warehouses and the difference between success and failure is planning for these issues.
- Set data standards. When you set data standards you can identify issues early on, thus making sure that you’re not faced with multiple unexpected problems at the final stage.
- Design the migration process and establish the migration sequence. This phase establishes what amount of downtime, if any, is acceptable. Also data can be migrated in different batches in order to complete larger projects.
- Assess the quality of data. Lost or corrupt data is a major impediment to a smooth transition and the more time taken to assess the quality of your data in the beginning will save time and effort later in the process.
- Have a proper risk management system in place. Data migration will test your data backup procedures to the limit which is why a thorough assessment of how you store and backup data is critical early on in the process. In fact, come cloud migrations might be too risky if your disaster recovery procedures are old or non-existent.
Properly test, document, and validate throughout the process. Regardless of the regulatory compliance you need to follow, any data migration will need to be tested and documented to maintain compliance and create an audit trail.
The Blue Net Advantage
Any cloud migration strategy needs to incorporate a business’s unique structure and challenges.
To make the data migration process go as smoothly as possible, we have found that communication is key. Not only does it help our clients understand our work, but their knowledge helps us create and deliver the best solution for their needs.
- We pay close attention to detail in every phase of migration, from planning to completion
- We speak plainly and explain highly technical issues in easy to understand terms.
- We have performed data migrations so we know how to handle issues as they arise.
- We validate and test throughout the process.
- We conduct a full assessment to make sure that the process is working.
Check out our page on cloud migration for more information about what we do and how we do it. If you have any questions, we are only a click away.