In the new normal, data drives modern businesses. This has become a bedrock for application deployment, innovations, and desired outcomes. However, businesses are required to maximize the value they extract from data to strengthen their current market position.
But how businesses can attain this?
Winning this new normal necessitates selecting an environment that fits best for your workloads while ensuring that data is kept securely and accessible. Enterprises move workloads to the cloud to manage their apps in the most cost-effective and high-performing IT environment. Migrating data to the cloud reduces operating costs and infrastructure maintenance while preventing technological obsolescence.
As per the BCG report, enterprises can save 15-40% infra costs by migrating to the cloud.
This is required to select the right data migration solution (including process, strategy, and platform like AWS) for a successful migration process. Let’s take a closer look at how a well-planned data migration process changes the journey for the best.
The Picture of Data Migration
Data migration is the procedure of selecting, formulating, extracting, and transforming data as well as permanently migrating it from one computer storage system to another. The process involves migrating information to distinct locations, file formats, environments, storage systems, databases, datacenters, or applications.
There are various reasons to undertake a data migration project such as redesigning a website, modernizing or replacing legacy software, increasing system and storage capacity, introducing a new system with existing applications, and transferring IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Some benefits of data migration:
- Advancing efficiency, performance, and scalability of the business applications
- Helps in adopting new technologies, market practices, operational efficiency, and regulatory requirements for excellent customer service.
- Reduce operational costs and increase productivity
However, when migrating data to the cloud, you also need to understand where you are transferring data, what types of data you are moving, and available networks or resources, among many. For this, migrating data to AWS offers various services and tools to help you migrate data easily and securely.
Data Migration Challenges
There are some risks involved in data migration process:
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Data Loss
Data loss is a common peril to address in the data migration process. For a small data transfer, it is less likely to miss any information, an IT team can restore data with the backup. For a short-term connection failure, IT could remain unaware that the migration process was interrupted shortly, and missing data goes unnoticed.
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Compatibility Issues
To transfer data, compatibility issues arise such as new operating systems, distinct file formats, inadequate communication between source and target servers, etc.
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Improper Conduct of the Process Impacting Business
Data migration is a sensitive yet complex process with significant business implications and demands much expert attention. A poorly conducted data migration could cause extended downtime, data loss, missed deadlines, exceeded budgets, and poor performance.
4 Types of Data Migration
Depending on the systems, servers and data involved, data migration can be categorized into four segments for achieving business’s objectives;
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Storage Migration
Storage migration involves transferring data from one storage device to a new or different storage device. The target device could be located in the same building or at a remote data center. When organizations decide to upgrade their equipment or infrastructure to boost their performance or save money on scalability, they go for storage migration.
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Database Migration
Database migration entails moving significant amounts of data to an upgraded or changed database engine or database management system that necessitates data conversion frequently. When organizations decide to upgrade their database software, migrate a database to the cloud, or switch database suppliers, they opt for database migrations.
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Application Migration
Application migration refers to moving data to a new computing environment. Database and storage migrations can be required to migrate an application. Organizations choose the application migration when a business changes software applications or vendors, which demands the data to move to a new cloud environment.
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Cloud Migration
Cloud migration involves transferring data or applications from a private, on-premises datacenter to the cloud or from one cloud environment to another. This enables organizations to scale with fewer constraints and upgrade more efficiently, and innovate steadily.
Step-by-step Data Migration on AWS
Here’re significant six steps to perform data migration successfully:
Step 1: Planning
Refining the scope is critical for potential data migration. An in-depth analysis of sources and target systems should be done with a proper timeline and budget. The project estimates must include all time and material expenses along with writing migration code, developing data transformation strategy, and loading and testing data.
Step 2: Understanding the Data
After identifying the core source tables/files, profiling and auditing tools are used to examine the data content of all prospective sources in order to comprehend the data and determine what needs to be migrated. This stage identifies potential conflicts and delves into the details to resolve any concerns or inconsistencies.
Step 3: Designing and Building
The architecture and design requirements are defined with proper specifications on the testing process and the method for transitioning them to a new system. If an organization is working on a large project, it is required to build and test in parallel.
Step 4: Executing
Using migration rules, data is extracted from the source system, transformed, cleaned, and loaded into the target system.
Step 5: Testing
This stage entails testing of the unit, system, volume, online application, and batch application. While developers aim to attain full-volume upload and online application testing swiftly, testing prevents steering up problems in the development cycle. They can conduct an audit at any point once the profile is created to identify any changes and take preventive actions.
Step 6: Follow-up and Maintenance
In this phase, once the IT infrastructure is organized, a data audit can be performed anytime on any dataset to compute the status of the project whether it finished or within its scope. The data quality tools maintain a high-level quality of data for future data migration and associated requirements.
Migrate from Legacy to New with Cloud4C
Data remains instrumental for every successful organization. It’s imperative to exploit most of it and use it to make intelligent actions while improving the customer experience.
For non-disruptive data migration, enterprises must require a vendor who understands all migration approaches and has expertise in migrating workloads to various platforms like AWS with multiple technologies.
Cloud4C is the right implementation partner to assist you in planning a cost-effective migration process while minimizing application downtime, especially when you are migrating mission-critical applications. Backed with AIOps-powered cloud solutions, we take care of your entire data migration journey with zero disruption and data loss. We promise an advance, fail-proof data migration on AWS with an industry-leading cloud migration factory approach. You can look at our AWS expertise here.
