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Data Migration: Everything you Need to Know!

Managing data 'well enough' is rarely practical due to the speed of digital transformation. Locked in various systems, separated in silos, data is all over the place, and it's hoarding at a staggering rate. However, with all the data together, you can gain a 360-degree view of your organisation. Data…

By Team #ARM Worldwide
July 15, 2022

Managing data 'well enough' is rarely practical due to the speed of digital transformation. Locked in various systems, separated in silos, data is all over the place, and it's hoarding at a staggering rate. However, with all the data together, you can gain a 360-degree view of your organisation. Data orchestration and migration are the best options for companies because they don't require additional storage locations for your data that sometimes leave you with just another silo. Read on to see how businesses can use information about customers, products, and services to make faster, better, more informed business decisions:

Understanding Data Migration

By implementing data migration practices in your organisation, you can gain a consolidated view of your organisation and unlock the full value of your data. Data migration collects all your data into a single storage system like a cloud data warehouse. As a result, analysts and employees access all the data they need from a single system to implement development solutions, resulting in a shorter time to insight. The capacity to use data effectively generates a true competitive advantage in today's digital economy. Data orchestration is the answer to making data more useful, available, and valuable. Businesses successfully migrating their data enjoy benefits like - a boost in productivity and efficiency, upgraded applications and services, and improved ability to scale resources, among others.

Types of Data Migration

Companies using the cloud are hoping to focus their staff on business priorities, increasing agility, reducing capital expenses, reshaping technology, fuelling top-line growth, and paying for only what they need on demand.

Storage migration offers faster performance and more cost-effective scaling while enabling expected data management features such as cloning, snapshots, backup and disaster recovery.
Cloud migration moves data, applications, or other business elements from either an on-premises data centre to a cloud or via one cloud to another.
Application migration moves app programs from one environment to another. It carries the entire app from an on-premises IT centre to a cloud, between clouds, or moves the app's underlying data to a new form of the app hosted by a software provider.

Modern Data Migration Approaches

Businesses need to understand the design requirements for migrated data, including migration schedules and priorities, backup and replication settings, capacity planning, and prioritising by data value. Successful data-driven migrations can be executed by a clear strategy, which can vary from company to company. Most strategies fall into these two principal categories - big bang migrations and trickle migrations.

'Big bang' migration entails conducting complete data migration in a single event within a defined window of time. This approach is relatively straightforward, as everything happens in a brief time-boxed event.
A 'trickle' migration involves running old and new environments alongside each other and moving the data in phases. The most significant advantage is the zero downtime it affords, making it ideal when migrating mission-critical applications that require 24/7 availability.

Building a Data Migration Strategy

Data migrations are usually complex undertakings that require careful planning and attention to detail. Businesses should consider a couple of factors when approaching their data migration project. For mission-critical workloads, the best approach is to migrate data in stages, keep the source and target systems running simultaneously, and test at intervals throughout the process. With online migrations, the amount of data and speed of the network connection determine the length of time required for the process. In addition, data orchestration deals with entire workflows rather than single tasks. When these workflows are unified around a set of centralised processes, it's easier to tweak and upscale services, simplifying optimisation.

Key Takeaways

While each data migration project is distinctive and presents its own challenges, some standard golden rules can help businesses safely transit their valuable data assets, avoiding critical delays. Test data migration during the planning and design stages and throughout execution and maintenance to ensure you will eventually achieve the desired outcome. Use data migration as a prospect to reveal and fix data quality issues. Set higher standards to improve data and metadata as you migrate them. Best data migration practices dictate the composition of a full backup of the content you plan to move before executing actual migration. As a result, you'll get an extra layer of protection if unexpected migration failures and data losses occur. Too many companies today are leaving their data fragmented and siloed. That prevents them from easily grasping an understanding of what their data is telling them. And this seems to be the critical root of many, if not all, difficulties. So considering migration as a vital innovation project worthy of special focus is half your battle won.