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Data Migration
Data migration is the process of transferring or moving data from one location, format, storage, or system to another, typically with the goal of preserving its integrity, accessibility, and usability. Data migration typically involves the extraction of the data from the source system, transformation of the data as necessary to ensure it fits the new system, and loading of the data onto the new system (ETL process). This ETL process needs to ensure that data remains consistent, secure, and functional throughout the transition. Effective data migration requires careful planning, validation, and verification to minimise potential disruptions and optimise the performance of the target system.
Why would your business need to migrate data
Data migration is often undertaken during system upgrades, technology migrations, or organisational changes to ensure the seamless transfer of information, minimise downtime, and maintain the continuity of business operations. Examples of when your business may need to migrate data include:
- Standardisation: Many businesses, especially small and medium sized businesses possess a lot of information that is housed in spreadsheets all across the organisation. Standardisation often means converting this information to more formal databases. This process involves data migration.
- Mergers and acquisitions: When merging with or acquiring an existing business, there is typically a need to consolidate the two sets of data that the two entities possess to ensure an integrated operation going forward. The data may be related to customers, suppliers, employees, or financial transactions.
- Transition from legacy to new systems: Transitioning from legacy systems to new systems typically requires the migration of data to ensure continuing operations. Furthermore, historical data may also be migrated to ensure that context is not lost when serving customers in future. The historical data is also a source for data analytics, business intelligence, and machine learning projects.
- Cloud adoption: More and more businesses are migrating their operational workloads and systems to the cloud. This typically goes hand in hand with the migration of the data that those systems will use from on premises databases to cloud databases and storage.
- Digital transformation: Digital transformation and digitalisation of processes often requires data migration, even though in a slightly different form. Where your business possesses paper-based documents, there is a need to migrate these documents from this format to electronic format. Furthermore, this also includes a change in the mode of storage from physical documents to cloud-based document databases.