Migrating data has always been a challenging and complex task for businesses all around the world. This is the reason why there are golden rules of data migration to follow.
Transferring millions of complex data units is way more complicated than you think. It’s not just moving data from one location to another like a simple copy and paste. Therefore, businesses should take measures to avoid errors in the data migration process. To help you out, here are some of the most important rules to follow when performing a data migration.
Data Migration Process: How Is Data Migration Usually Done?
Although there are different types of data migration that your business can employ depending on your requirements, the data migration process follows the same flow. Listed below are the most common data migration steps to ensure a successful data migration project.
- Creating a data migration plan
- Employing the right digital tools for data audit and profiling
- Completing data backup to protect against any future loss
- Hiring data migration specialists or a team of experts for migration design
- Executing properly to achieve zero downtime and reduce potential risks
- Testing at each phase to check data quality
- Conducting a post-migration audit to validate key features and perfect the migration
What are the Golden Rules of Data Migration?
Every migration project has its share of challenges. Based on the most common data migration issues, challenges, and overall experiences, data migration experts in New Zealand and the world have come up with a set of rules (the golden rules) that can help help you safely transfer data to its new destination without any loss or critical delay.
1. Work with Data Migration Experts or Specialists in New Zealand
Make sure you are assisted by a data migration specialist throughout the whole data migration process. If you have a big organisation or company with a large amount of data to transfer, consider hiring a dedicated data migration team to run the migration project smoothly.
A data migration team in New Zealand will help you plan and strategise your project from start to finish. This includes transferring your data and converting any content when needed while looking at the risks and preparing for potential impacts. Moreover, data migration specialists will audit your deployments and existing data systems, as well as spot errors and any areas for improvement.
2. Perform Pre-Migration Checks and Clean-Ups
It’s vital that you clean and fix any issue in your data before migrating it to a new destination. Track down and collect all your data before the start of your data migration. After which, clean up any inaccuracies or duplications to make sure that these incorrect or old data are not transferred into the new platform or system. This will help prevent future errors and avoid data loss.
In addition, it will help you improve data quality and metadata details as you migrate it. The complete source data should also be profiled correctly well in advance before writing the mapping scripts.
3. Decide on Which Data to Move
If you’re migrating data to the cloud, you must decide which and how much data to migrate. Doing so will help avoid or minimise downtime as you’ll also reduce the amount of data to be transferred. Thus, evaluating your datasets and anticipating the effects of moving these datasets will reduce their impact on your business stability.
4. Define and Decide on the Design of the Migration
Do you need to move your entire dataset from the legacy to the new destination in one operation? Or do you need to break down the data migration into smaller sub-migrations?
The design phase of the data migration process should be given a reasonable amount of time as it highly impacts the success or failure of the migration project.
With a big bang type of migration, all your systems will be down and unavailable to your teams and end users. As long as data is being transferred and undergoing transformation to meet the requirements of the new infrastructure, you won’t be able to access it. This type of migration is usually done on weekends or long holidays when data systems are not used as much.
With a trickle migration, you can break down the entire data migration in small increments, each with its own scope, timelines, goals, and audits. Moreover, it will run both old and new systems simultaneously. There will be zero downtime, although the data migration will take more time to complete.
5. Don’t Switch Off the Old Platform Just Yet
This is the last and most important rule. Avoid immediately switching off the old platform after you’ve completed the data migration. That’s because the data migration might fail, or errors might occur in the first few attempts. If you close the old system right away, rollbacks or retries may be more challenging and problematic.
Final Thoughts
Businesses that have gone through a data migration process know how stressful and problematic it could be if not done correctly. This is why a particular focus should be given to this significant undertaking, and data migration specialists should be hired to win this complex battle.
Most key aspects, as well as the golden rules of data migration to help you run a proper and error-free data migration, have been covered in this post. Still, it’s recommended to seek the professional advice of a data migration specialist or hire a data migration team who can facilitate a smooth data transfer process for your business.
Fortunately, you can use different tools and employ various strategies and techniques to make your data migration smooth and less costly. Avoid the pitfalls of data migration in New Zealand by working with a team of data migration experts. Contact us for a chat or to request for a demo!
