It is not a secret that IT runs most of business operations nowadays. Changing its platform can significantly affect business operations and continuity. To be honest, it definitely will, if you won’t pay enough attention to all aspects, challenges and possible issues while migrating. Still a large number of data migrations fail due to fact that it is often considered as an unfortunate cost, leading to an underfunded and oversimplified way of data migration.
What are the challenges and biggest fears of data migration?
Firstly, what is this fear bubble about data migration and where does it come from? Is it really that black as it’s painted and what are the biggest fears? The ever-increasing demand for efficient IT solutions, fast growing supply of new technologies and a high competitiveness level in the IT field have rapidly increased the need for data migration between one environment to another for among enterprises. As data migration increased, mistakes increased in the process as well. Lack of experience and knowledge are the main factors that caused and still cause a lot of trouble in data migration process. The biggest fears enterprises struggle with are:
- Will it cause budget overruns?
- How long will be the downtime?
- Is the process secure or do I need to worry about data loss?
- Is the new environment compatible with my existing one?
- Does my IT staff have enough knowledge of data migration?
- Will the new system be suitable for my business operations?
- How long will it take to fully migrate?
- Has the selected migration solution been tested before?
As data migration projects have a negative tendency to fail, mostly because enterprises don’t put enough attention to migration plan, it can truly lead to budget overruns. Starting from extra expenditures for creating migration components, testing them and ending with business losses because of downtime caused by unprofessionally held migration process. Data migration should be considered as a necessary cost coming together with a new IT system or platform. Without planning extra budget for migration when thinking about new IT platform, is like not thinking about fuel expenditures when buying a new car.
Significant role in data migration plays data itself. Depending on how data is integrated in business and how it becomes customized over time, certain datasets become interdependent and difficult to migrate to the new environment. It is very important to sort out data, application and system complexities to improve data management and enable application mobility at the very first. Since almost all data in applications is integrated to ensure your business operations, integration level is very critical in the process of migration.
For a smooth data center migration - it is better to trust experts!
No matter how large and educated is your IT staff, data migration still is not their everyday task. Some small, but important migration aspects can stay unnoticed and cause extended downtime, system damage or data loss. Organizations use various strategies to minimize all negative impacts, but only service provider that have accumulated experience with data migration can offer you a previously tested step-by-step migration solution that will transfer your system and data to the new environment.
What are the main benefits when you rely on IT experts to handle data migration for you?
- Well-considered data migration plan
Successful data migration is based on precise details put together in data migration plan. It is not only a plan about what to do, but also when and what to do, if an error happens. This component causes many migration fails for enterprises, if not created very accurately with deep understanding of all processes. An accurate plan is time-consuming and requires for special knowledge and experience. Plan determines the method of data import and export, network reconstruction, as well as prepares resources and it mostly has some black spots that can be seen only with an experienced eye. So, is your IT director ready to take responsibility for such complex development plan to process data migration with minimal migration time and downtime?
- Minimal downtime
How the company can do its core business and earn, if its system is not working? Impossible in the 21st century! Downtime is the parameter that causes business losses directly. Of course, it is the most sensitive one, when thinking about data migration. Downtime needs to be predicted in the data migration plan at the very first. To predict it very precisely, professionals test migration using additional temporary platform in between the old and new platform. That can be very time consuming and expensive as company’s in-house procedure and it definitely demands for deep knowledge of data migration aspects and system compatibility.
- Minimal migration time
This factor is very important for any business when considering data migration. And we all want this process done as soon as possible. Since data migration consists of various steps from creating data migration plan, predicting downtime, transferring data or whole IT platform to compatibility checks afterwards, there are plenty of chances to extend migration time, because of mistakes or unpredicted issues. Only with accumulated long-term experience, it is possible to foresee all challenges and to determine those critical ones that need to have special attention. Outsourced IT experts will coordinate the migration in accordance with your business needs not affecting your business procedures.
- Fast data movement
Fast internet connections that IT providers use transferring data from your existing system to the new one is a must have to ensure minimal migration time. Migrating large amount of data and systems, stable, fast and secure connection will significantly improve process to ensure its continuity.
- Additional temporary platform in between
Additional temporary platform in between the old and new IT environment is a perfect tool that IT providers use in order to avoid any possible risks of system, application incompatibility and data loss. In this case, all your data will be shifted to a temporary platform and only after that migrated to the new IT platform.
IT system that is based on more than one providers’ IT resources or distributed between your and third party resources is a very complex system that demands for deep understanding and experience to migrate it or part of it to other IT environment. You have to integrate your migration tools in third party resources to successfully transfer data and applications. IT experts have tools and experience how to use them to migrate data not affecting existing IT system and its availability.
When migrating data and applications, migration is done only after compatibility checks. This needs to be scheduled in migration plan and in the case of incompatibility, will extend the migration time or downtime. Letting specialists migrate your business data, you will be sure that experienced team follows-up your data and system and will adjust system quickly to avoid any time shifts of migration process. With an accurate step-by-step data migration plan, finding and evaluating all hidden challenges and managing data migration as part of the investment in the new system, will definitely ensure migration is proceeded smoothly and with minimal downtime. Choosing IT experts for your data migration, choose wisely in order secure your business, minimize risks and downtime! Stay assured that you will be able to continue your core business while certified specialists will migrate business IT platform for you!
Why temporary platform is so important?
Firstly, you will be able to delete your old system and data sooner and this is relevant in case you are using third party IT resources and don’t want to pay extra subscription for the time you maintain the data only for security reasons. Temporary platform may help in case if you delete some files in your old system and afterwards realize the new system does not have some compatibility and you need to make extra copies from the old environment.
Secondly, IT providers usually build temporary platform on backup platform that can connect with wide range of environments and incompatibility risk is very low. Backup system is a perfect environment to prepare your data to be compatible with the cloud too. Setting up an additional temporary platform by yourself of course would be very time consuming and it will increase your expenditures for sure, so using IT provider who practices this approach is the best way to reduce data migration risks and stay fully secured.
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