Digital disruption is the new normal in the 2020s. On the one hand, you have the pressing needs of businesses to stay competitive in these days of a once in a century pandemic. On the other hand, large enterprises are acquiring other companies, either organically or inorganically.
Companies are increasingly getting involved in adopting digital transformation, which means that IT departments have to implement changes in information systems that support critical business processes. One of the most essential elements during the adoption of a new information system is data migration. Migrating data is a complicated exercise, and there are a few typical sticking points that all data migration projects face. These are:
1) Not having the buy-in of business users at the start
While your IT department may be ultimately responsible for data migration, it is vital to involve your business users from the beginning of the entire exercise. Keeping them engaged from the planning stage itself is essential to ensure that your IT department is not flooded with support requests after the migration is complete. You should ensure that a proper data migration plan is in place, which mentions the essential stakeholders and what stage they need to be involved in the entire exercise.
2) Security concerns with popular cloud storage apps for business usage
Enterprises are increasingly adopting applications that operate in the cloud. As a result, employees of such enterprises are actively using consumer-grade cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox to store their data. While this approach may help bring down costs for a company, there are some inherent security risks of using such solutions.
An elegant way to get around such security concerns is to enforce company-wide adoption of a third-party solution that provides secure access to storage while leveraging your existing IT infrastructure. Centrestack allows you to give remote web access to your Windows file servers and use it in a similar way to other online file-sharing services.
3) Loss of data during migration
In the case of large enterprises, data migration may involve transferring multiple gigabytes or even terabytes of data from one location to another. As a result, there is a probability that some data being migrated may be lost. Loss of non-critical business data will, in all likelihood, not be missed. But, some kinds of data loss have the potential of having severe implications for the business.
It is vitally important to implement effective backup strategies to prevent such a circumstance from arising. All essential data should be backed up before being migrated from its current environment. Doing so will enable your IT department to roll back part of the data migration in the event of any problem arising.
4) Running into hardware challenges.
At times the new environment might not have sufficient capacity to handle either the migrated data or your applications, or both. You may end up wasting money if you overestimate the required capacity. At the same time, it is not safe to assume that all of your existing applications will run in the new environment. You may also run into unexpected problems such as your server getting damaged during the migration exercise or your server cabinets not physically fitting in the new data center.
To overcome such hardware challenges, you should ensure that your equipment fits properly in the server racks. It’s also essential to run a check on all your legacy hardware after you move them. The main point to ensure is to check that your existing equipment works properly after the migration. All new equipment should meet current operational requirements to prevent any unpleasant surprises.
Conclusion
Data migration is a big undertaking for companies. However, you and your IT department should be aware of the sticking points you may face while carrying out data migration. It’s essential to have a rock-solid migration strategy that accounts for the issues highlighted in this article.