At some point in a company’s lifecycle, data migration is bound to happen. Mergers, acquisitions, technological innovation, transitioning to cloud, business process optimization, regulatory mandates, or sheer data volume growth are just a few of the reasons data migrations occur.
One thing you can be sure of is that when the time comes, your company is faced with a critical IT project that needs to be executed with precision, expertise, and breadth of knowledge. You as an IT professional are faced with the question whether you are sure you know how to handle it right.
Critical Questions for Every Organization Planning Migration
No matter what the cause for data migration, you need to have a migration strategy in place. Moreover, you need to be able to answer these questions:
- Do you know exactly what data will be migrated, the data that won’t, and how are you going to handle each?
- How are you going to ensure that once the data is moved, it will still be accessible and its integrity will be uncompromised?
- Who will design the migration plan and carry out the actual migration?
- How will you communicate the stages of the migration plan internally, among employees, and externally, among your customers?
- Who is responsible for the security, integrity and compliance of the data undergoing migration?
- What technology will automate the migration?
- Who is your Migration Guru at mission control?
Why External Expertise Makes the Difference
In a recent post on how to ensure on-time and on-budget delivery of critical IT projects, we made the case for engaging an external IT Program Manager. We pointed out that such a dedicated resource possesses the soft skills and technical expertise that companies often lack in-house.
Working with a client on a recent migration project, we were reminded that the same reasoning applies to data migrations. Most of the skills needed in a data migration whether it is a merger, an acquisition, or just data relocation, are transient. Usually, they are missing from the internal IT team’s core competencies. At the same time, a successful data migration presupposes a lot of short and long-term planning, as well as the ability to anticipate multiple disaster scenarios, and the respective strategies to avert or overcome them.
The iShift Migration Advantage
This is where working with the iShift Migration team can really pay off. We have experience and expertise in migrating data across various platforms. Moreover, we know how to devise a successful strategy in merging organizations together. We will offer successful migration scenarios whether this means just migrating the data to the acquiring company or merging data sources between companies.
Sometimes, a company may be undergoing a transformational change that doesn’t involve mergers and acquisitions, merely rearchitecting its IT infrastructure in the cloud. We can help there too.
What You Get: Migration Team + Migration Strategy
Our experienced engineers utilize their migration skills every day, so they are always fresh and ready to go. There is no need to invest budget and time training your scarce internal IT resources on skills they will use one time. When we join forces with you to execute your data migration, you get the migration team AND you get the migration strategy:
- We will help you define the data to be migrated and decide what to do with the data that won’t.
- We will work with you to ensure that the data is not only moved from one location to another, but is also compatible, verifiable, and accessible within the new system.
- We will make sure that you can provide chain-of-custody reporting for the migrated data.
- We will outline the security plan for the migration.
- We will advise you in selecting the migration technology to automate the process and lead the team performing the data migration.
- Depending on your business goals, our advisors will define your migration process for a smooth and successful project.
