Think about moving all your essential information from one place to another without much effort! Sounds great, right? Well, that’s the miracle of efficient data migration. But there is a hidden problem: all data migrations are not the same. Different approaches lead to different strategies.
Deeply understanding these things can make a huge difference between a continuous operation and turbulence.
Therefore, in this blog, we are going to shed light on key types of data migration, tools, and popular ways to land data safely from one point to another.
What is Data Migration?
Data Migration simply means to move digital information from one place to another.
Imagine you are moving to a new house. You’ve packed all your belongings neatly in boxes and you’re ready to migrate to a new home. To do this very cautiously, you will need to decide what to move, how to move it, and finally where to position it.
Likewise, you will transfer digital information to a specific location, file format, database, or whatever place you like. This whole process of selecting, transferring, and placing information comes under the umbrella of data migration.
Data Migration is the process of selecting, transferring, and placing digital information from one storage platform to another.
How To Do It?
Data migration process can be tough, especially when transferring critical data. Why? Because data is something very sensitive, and contains all the information about any company or system.
It needs security because nobody wants to lose information at every cost. That’s why stakeholders are often reluctant to undergo this activity.
The TSB’s IT meltdown is one of the most infamous examples of data loss and caused them to face significant disruptions in business.
This happens due to failed data migration. Which is why you need a well-defined strategy of migrating data before going forward.
Following is a 3-step process of data migration:
Decide
In the first step, you’ve to design a strategy. The following step is designed with organization in mind. Here you will be required to assess and clean your data sources. After that, you will design your migration. You will explain things to your key stakeholders and inform them with solutions. And finally, test that solution.
Implement
As the name suggests, you will implement your solution. You will practically execute the movement. This action will be stressful because your stakeholder will be subjected to risk of losing information.
Check
Finally you check if the process went according to plan or not. Now you will verify your migration and recheck your previous databases.
3 Ways to Transfer Data Effectively
Every data migration project is different based on the systems and the amount of information. Therefore, this process is classified into these 3 ways:
1. Storage Migration
This is the first and foremost type of data migration. This category involves storage devices moving data from one place to another. Organizations go for this option when they find the need to upgrade their equipment or infrastructure to get instant performance. Besides this it is also implemented with an intention to cut costs.
Furthermore, during storage migration, organizations also have the possibility to clean and validate the information. However, it is less obvious that organizations opt to change the format of the information during storage migration.
2. Schema Migration
Also known as database migration, it involves tons of information to be transferred to an updated database platform. Compared to storage migration, this type of migration is more complex. This is because not only does it have a large amount of information being transferred. But also due to the fact that information is something that often changes with time.
However, schema migration becomes essential for organizations when they need to
- Upgrade their Database Software.
- Transfer Database to the Cloud
- Change Database Vendors
3. Cloud Migration
Compared to the previous category of storage based migration, cloud migration includes the migration process of applications and data. Application migration or “Lift and Shift” both come under this same category. Main focus of cloud migration is to specifically extract data from private or foundational databases to the cloud system.
Tools Used for Data Migration
If you are thinking about data migration, you will get different tools to help you through the process effectively. One choice is that you can build your personal data migration tool from scratch. The benefit of doing this is that you can tailor the tools to their specific systems and situations.
On the contrary, you can also go for the best data migration tools available in the market. But here the process does not end. Even with a tool, you will need to identify everything about the information being migrated.
For instance,
- Total amount of data being transferred
- What changes are going to be made
- Check for issues to be resolved upon completion
For a better experience, you should go for such data migration software that should work well. Especially when the data and target systems are all on-site and within the same group. Unlike cloud-based softwares that is feasible to use when moving different data storage systems.
Final Thoughts
After that, you have decided to start data migration. Now it’s time to begin exploring the best options available in the form of software. In our next blog, we are going to delve deeper into the science of data migration.
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