The business world is all about “Big Data” and how to utilize the same to the best of its capabilities. To make the most out of the data generated daily, every organization needs well-established data integration and data migration processes. The processes will help the data analysts to seamlessly bring the data under one big umbrella and migrate the data from one repository to another, from inputs to a data lake, from data warehouses to data mart or into the cloud storage for further analysis and reporting functions.

The success of the data migration process depends on the competency of the data migration strategy, and without a competent strategy, you may find yourself struggling to sync the functioning of your data operations with your expectations.

Before moving on to how to plan a successful Data Migration Strategy, let’s first take a look at the brief explanation of Data Migration.

What is Data Migration?

Data migration is a process that involves the transferring of data from one system to another. This might seem like a child’s play but involves a change in database and storage. When you migrate data, the data goes through a series of functions (like transforming unstructured or semi-structured data into another format) before it is finally loaded into its target location. 

Different organizations find the need for data migration for a number of reasons. They may want to upgrade their databases, improve the working of their entire system, merge data from another source, or for any other specific purpose. 

The process of data migration holds crucial importance when it comes to the following:

• Maintaining data integrity.
• Increasing ROI by lowering expenses on media and storage
• Eliminating unnecessary interruptions in data integration activities
• Minimizing the role of manual activities
• Boosting the productivity level in the organization
• Maintaining the increasing growth curve of the business.

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DataChannel provides you a comprehensive data integration technology that can help you skyrocket your organizational productivity and deal with challenges that come up while managing large volumes of data. 

With our data warehousing solution, you can bring all your data from diverse source systems under one big umbrella and run analysis to dig deeper and surface the valuable and actionable insights to improve decision-making. We understand how access to the right data at the right time can help your business thrive, and that’s why we offer more than 100 APIs connectors to ensure the flow of all your essential data from multiple marketing platforms to an efficient data warehouse. 

With DataChannel, you can get a unified picture of all your data within the frame of a cloud platform that you can use to become a leading data-driven organization.

How to plan a successful Data Migration Strategy?

To ensure your data migration project’s success, it’s crucial that you create a powerful data migration strategy. The right strategy will make the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, transforming, and loading data as smoothly as possible. To help you out, we are mentioning a few steps that you can consider while formulating  your data migration strategy:

• Determine the data format, location, and sensitivity: Before initiating the data migration process, it’s important to find out what sort of data you want to migrate, what its current format is, where it lives, and in what format you want it to be transformed. Only after getting answers to these questions, you will get a clear understanding of your project. In addition to this, you will also be able to identify the risks associated with data migration and plan out counter-strategies for the same. 
• Define the scope of your strategy: Once you are clear about the data you want to migrate, it’s time to define the scope of your data migration strategy. List out the resources you want while migrating the data and put a realistic budget to it. Apart from this, find out how much time it will take for your data to migrate into the preferred storage system. This will help you outline a flexible timeline for your project completion.
• Don’t forget to take a backup of all your data: Before migrating the data, ensure that you have the backup of all the data you are migrating. Suppose any problem arises as the data migrates, like missing or incomplete files, or corrupt data. In that case, you will have the option to correct the error or issues by restoring the data back in its original form.
• Assess the required data migration tools: Data migration is not as easy as it may seem, especially when you have tons of complex data to migrate. Before you begin with data migration, ensure to determine the following aspects:
• If your team has the required skills and knowledge to handle the project.
• If your team has access to the required resources and time to meet the project requirements.
• If you have a reliable person who can manage the project from start to finish and can determine things like who will use the data migration software and handle other aspects of the project to ensure its successful completion.
• Execute your data migration strategy: To make your strategy work as expected, ensure that the right system permissions are applied for seamless migration of the data into the target location. Ensure that the data is cleaned to protect the target system and to facilitate its transformation into a proper format. Precisely monitor your entire data migration process to identify problems that may arise and solve them in real-time.
• Testing: After you are done with the migration process, ensure that there are no connectivity issues between the source and target systems. The data migration strategy’s goal is to ensure that the migration process is accurate, secure, and in the exact location. To make your data migration plan error-proof, conduct various tests, including system, unit, volume, batch application, and web-based tests.
• Follow-up your data migration strategy: Testing doesn’t guarantee zero error occurrence. An error can occur even after you have tested your strategy under every possible aspect. To make your data migration process error-free, conduct a full audit of the data quality and the system. This will help you ensure the accuracy of the entire process. In case you find any inaccurate, missing, incomplete, or corrupt data, restore the files from the backup.

Get Started with Data Migration

Keep all the pointers mentioned above in mind while planning a strategy that can assure you the success of your data migration project. Just make sure to store the backup of all the data before beginning with the data management process so that if any error occurs, you can undo the damage and recover the data on which your business growth and success relies on.