7 Data Migration Steps to Build Your Plan
With 99 percent of companies planning a move to the cloud in the next few years, odds are there’s a data migration project in your future. Whether you’re upgrading data storage, switching databases, moving to the cloud or adding a data warehouse, you need to be able to migrate your existing data safely and efficiently. As big data continues to grow bigger, data migration is becoming a routine part of data management. Migration is the process that’s going to get your data where it needs to go. Consider the following steps as you plan your next data migration project.
To successfully move your data, you have to understand where exactly it is and how to access it. Take a complete inventory of all of the data that you need to move. Consider data locations, types of data you’re dealing with, and the format of your data in the source systems and in the target system. Determine if you will be migrating any potentially sensitive data, such as data containing personally identifiable information (PII) and take steps to make sure this data will be properly secured before, during, and after the data migration process. Work with data owners to gain access to the systems you need.
It’s also important to understand how all of your data impacts existing business processes. You want to make sure that you don’t break any existing processes during the migration process. Engage data owners in your project planning and work with them to ensure that the migration goes smoothly.
There are a couple of different schools of thought when it comes to timing for data migration projects. You can migrate all of your data at the same time, which is known as a “big bang” strategy. The biggest benefit to this approach is speed. However, the trade-off is that this approach almost always requires system downtime. “Trickle” migration involves completing the project in phases, while running source and target systems in parallel. Migrating data incrementally will take longer, but it can usually be performed without having to shut down key systems. Trickle migration requires less downtime and provides more testing opportunities. It’s important to pick the data migration timeline that’s right for your organization and your users.
Losing data adds a lot of stress and extra work to any project. So make sure that you have current, complete backups of all of your data before you begin moving the data around. If you encounter any problems during the migration, such as corrupt, incomplete, or missing files, you can restore this data from backup.
Migrating data can be tricky.
