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With data of diverse formats flowing in from different systems, the existing system may need an upgrade to a superior server. Data Migration Services enable organizations to expand their data store and management features and makes complete use of data to constrain business decisions. It is an extensively used process of transferring data, and nearly every organization carries out one at some point.

What Is Data Migration?

As per the International Data Corporation (IDC), data migration symbolizes 60% of any large organization’s IT project. But what is it actually?

Briefly, it implies to the data transfer between various types of file formats, databases, and storage systems. However, the transfer is not a single aspect of data migration methodology. If the existing data is vast, the migration process might include mappings and transformations between source and target data.

Before migrating the data, its quality needs to be assessed essentially to ensure a successful execution without data loss. The success rate of any data migration plan is directly reliant on the variety, volume, and quality of data being moved.

Data migration is important for any organization because it is an obligatory component to upgrading or combining server and storage hardware, or integrating data-intensive applications, such as databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and large-scale virtualization projects. Data migration may also take place within systems designed on HDD or SDD, or between on-premises systems and cloud storage.

Why Do You Need Data Migration?

The most common motive of going through migration is the need to transfer data to a new system to scale up and give rise to volume growth. However, other conditions may also prompt organizations to start a data migration project. The reasons comprise:

• To substitute legacy systems, that are incapable of sustaining the growing performance requirements of the organization
• To diminish the data storage plan by migrating to a system that uses less power and space. Therefore, reducing the operational costs
• To stay competitive by leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, overlaying the path for data migration
• To set up a disaster recovery plan; as data migration can help to keep the data secure
• To move data to the cloud, reducing the cost of on-premise IT infrastructure

Challenges and Risks in Data Migration

Data migration has always been risky and tricky. It’s definitely not a simple process. It is time-consuming, needs proper planning, and following appropriate implementation steps. Hence, there is always some risk included in projects of this scale.

Data Loss

Data loss can happen anytime during the data migration process. On a low level, this may not be an issue – no one may ever overlook any data, or IT can refurbish files with backup.

However, disastrous data loss is different. When there is the case of a short-term connection failure, IT may not even realize that the momentary failure unexpectedly terminated the migration process. The missing data go unobserved until a user or application requests for it, and it is not found there.

Compatibility Concerns

There are also compatibility concerns in transferring data, like changed operating systems and unpredicted file formats, or uncertainty over user access rights between the source and target systems. Although the data is not officially lost, the business users cannot access it in the target system.

Poor Implementation Impacts Business

Many IT departments choose to do migration projects on-premises to save money, or the management team makes a decision regarding it for them. But trying to migrate data by yourself is not really a good data migration strategy. Migration is an uncertain business process with major business implications and needs broad expert attention.

A weakly performed data migration project causes more downtime, data loss, miss deadlines, surpasses budgets, and results in low-level performance.

Why Are Organizations Migrating To The Cloud?

Today, one of the most common reasons for data migration is shifting warehouses into a cloud. Cloud-based warehouses can be better over traditional on-premise data warehouses in aspects of speed, reliability, and security. Let's take a look at how migrating to the cloud can help with some general data warehouse situations.

• It is cost-effective because it does not include hardware. So you won’t need to replace your hardware repeatedly.
• It is very easy to use. Your data is saved in the cloud, and team members can effortlessly connect, run queries, and produce reports from wherever they are in the world.
• When you migrate your data warehouse to the cloud, you get an immediate team of cloud experts to help you set up your solution and conduct testing.
• The cloud data warehouse is infinitely flexible, and you can adjust it according to the requirements, size, and formats of data.
• A Cloud data warehouse is a highly secured location for data to be stored, meeting all the necessary standards of the industry.

What is the Right Migration Technique?

Many factors determine the right migration technique for an organization, like the resources availability, data volume, data sensitivity, and business needs. The method that provides the right combination of reliability, migration efficiency, and least impact on users and business processes is the one that can best fulfill the requirements of any organization.

A survey is conducted by TDWI to identify the technologies adopted by organizations to migrate or combine databases. ETL evolved as an ideal technology, with 41% of respondents voting in its support. Manual coding (27%), database replication (11%), and Enterprise Application Integration (3.5%) are the other processes used for migration.

Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL)

ETL tools can tackle even the complex needs of the data migration process. It includes processing big data sets, thorough data profiling, and integration between various platforms. Some ETL tools offer the features of automating the standard ETL operations, such as restoring data from operational systems, converting it into a unified format, and loading it into a target database.

Get Started Today!

Choosing the best services is critical for any business.  So you have to understand the needs of your business, find the best approach to move your data, and keep it safe in data warehouses.

Are you still confused about where to start? Let the worries to the experts and hire data migration services right away!