Three Ways To Ensure Your Data Migration Is A Success

Data migration is an important project that companies these days are prioritizing more often. Whether it be because you are switching new platforms, purging obsolete data or archiving historical records, data migration efforts take a lot of planning, require a lot decision making and warrant the need to consider security and risks associated with handling/moving their data. Lewis Wynne- Jones, Forbes council member and VP of Product at ThinkData Works, shares an article on how to ensure that your data migration will go smoothly. “Data migration is a challenge and an opportunity, explains Jones. “It’s an opportunity to future-proof your organization, gain a competitive advantage, reduce friction and improve operations. But it’s not a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution. Custom approaches are always required. It will take time and energy to do it right.” Below are three ways, according to Jones, that will ensure your data migration is a success.

1. Gain the benefit of cloud-based tools now, not later. “By virtualizing legacy data sources and inaugurating a modern analytics stack during migration, you’ll parallelize the migration effort into two streams: one that’s focusing on the migration itself, and another that’s extracting value out of data today. The first is running a critical improvement; the second helps pay for it.”
2. Consistently verify the correctness of the migration. “One of the reasons migration efforts are hard to complete is the worry that the new environment won’t mirror the old one. The problem here is that most data environments lack a staging area that provides a lens into what the old data looks like, how it’s built and what applications it’s powering. Data lineage graphs should help here: Spot-check where data lives and where it’s going, then do the same thing with the new data and make sure all processes are accounted for. When you’re satisfied that all downstream processes have been accounted for, you can confidently move the data.”
3. Know your data. “You don’t need to know everything—there can and should be discovery and decisioning during the migration—but creating a comprehensive data inventory and establishing your requirements about the new schema, location, access protocol, business glossary and metadata fields before the migration means you’ll have a decent sense of what you have, what you want and how it will be used. These are North Stars you can refer to during the migration to make sure the process is going as planned.”

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