Data migration strategy and plan

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Evolving from traditional to modern data security and management is key to moving data seamlessly and efficiently to cloud-based apps and between public cloud, on-premises, hybrid cloud, and edge environments. Data migration projects require a well-defined data migration plan that includes setting dates, identifying stakeholders, overcoming challenges, developing a strategy, and implementing technical aspects. The outline below includes the planning, testing, and execution steps required for success.

Why Migrate

What is a data migration?

Data migration is the process of transferring data from one or more applications, systems, or storage locations to another. Organizations may migrate data for data mobility purposes, transferring data from and to various environments, including systems running in a public cloud, on-prem, a hybrid cloud, or at the edge.

Understanding data migrations

Organizations implement a data migration strategy to relocate data safely and securely to a new location or application in a controlled manner to minimize disruption to users and business operations. Financial considerations, agility, and efficiency are primary drivers of enterprise data migrations. Examples include consolidation as legacy systems are replaced and the introduction of applications in the cloud that may share a dataset.

Organizations often perform data migration activities as part of the five R's of application modernization:

Refactoring

by rewriting or making significant code changes to the application.

Replatforming

by containerizing an application.

Rehosting

by changing the underlying platform the app runs on, but not the application itself.

Retaining

by optimizing and running the application as-is.

Retiring

by replacing with a SaaS option.

Types of data migrations

Different scenarios require different types of data migrations. Examples include:

  • Database migration
  • Storage migration
  • Business process migration
  • Application migration
  • Cloud migration
Type of Migrate

Why organizations migrate their data and why it’s important

Digital business has led to exponential data growth. Statista forecasts that the amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide will exceed 394 zettabytes by 2028.

The collection and safekeeping of such fast-growing data is becoming increasingly burdensome to organizations—from a financial, operational, and security perspective.

Organizations are executing or seriously considering data migration strategies to remain competitive, optimize operations, ensure security and compliance, and support growth and innovation.

Why Organizations Migrate

What are the challenges of data migration?

Challenges associated with data migration can include:

  • Insufficient planning leads to increased time and budget First, organizations must understand the amount and complexity of the data being migrated, the systems involved, the migration approach to be used, and the correct team members to be involved to keep a data migration project on track.
  • Poor data governance – Teams also must address data quality, integrity, and compatibility issues before migration, including ensuring data mapping so fields are accurately populated across systems.
  • Security and compliance requirements – Organizations must adhere to the chain of custody and other industry and government mandates regarding the safe handling of sensitive customer and transaction information.
  • System and data compatibility issues – The massive fragmentation of an organization’s data can make it more difficult to move large amounts of data.
  • Lack of organizational coordination – When communication among the teams involved in the data migration strategy—from IT and security to operations—breaks down, delays, errors, and risks to the organization rise.

Data migration process to ensure a successful migration

A successful data migration strategy involves planning, testing, and transferring enterprise data. Thus, the data migration process focuses on three key steps: extracting, transforming, and loading data. Within each step, organizations follow a more specific process, typically involving 7-12 tasks, depending on the data migration they are undertaking.

Data migration Process

Data migration steps and checklist — 12 things to know and do

  1. Assess the quality and integrity of your data to be migrated.
  2. Identify your key teams/stakeholders and establish communications channel(s) with them.
  3. Create a project plan with goals, timelines, and budgets—including system decommissioning date plans.
  4. Socialize your plan.
  5. Analyze your to-be-migrated data, including performing data mapping actions.
  6. Establish rigorous data integrity processes (e.g., data quality rules management).
  7. Deploy a data security and data management solution to support your data to move.
  8. Allow the solution to extract your data to be migrated.
  9. Test the migration logic in a mirrored production environment.
  10. Seamlessly allow the solution to transform your data to match the new environment.
  11. Load your data into the production environment and validate your data migration success against your plan.
  12. Decommission your old systems and continue to monitor your migrated data in the new environment.

The benefits of using data migration tools to migrate your data.

Companies investing in a single platform to move their data accurately, securely, and efficiently for greater business return can significantly improve:

Data quality

Consolidating data from multiple sources eliminates duplicate and outdated information, which boosts data accuracy and freshness.

Operational efficiency

Teams that can access critical data wherever it lives—on-prem or in the cloud—simplify data management, reducing the time and staff resources required to advance digital business.

Cost savings

Companies that modernize data centers by migrating data to more efficient onsite and cloud data security and data management solutions can reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Cohesity and data migrations

Cohesity’s modern data security and management solutions help organizations ensure simpler, safer, and more successful data migration and transfers between applications and environments.

Whether enterprises choose public cloud, hybrid cloud, on-prem, or edge environments, Cohesity solutions streamline data migration with capabilities that improve:

  • Consolidation – Organizations can merge data from multiple systems and sources into a single location for improved data management.
  • Scalability – Teams can move on-prem data to cloud-based storage to improve scalability, flexibility, and cost.
  • Upgrades – Organizations can seamlessly transfer data from an existing system to a new one, helping ensure minimal disruption to the business.

Learn more about Cohesity data migration.

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