The world of technology doesn’t stand still, and what seemed like the perfect system for your business can feel like a stone age implement 10 years later, which is why the poor souls in IT are continually assessing new systems and orchestrating the changes whilst trying to minimise disruption and costs.
When businesses elect to move to any new system there will always be the question of what to do with legacy data. In the past it was common for businesses to just archive the data and hope that they never needed to retrieve it again, but times have changed. Firstly with belts tightening, the risks of a claim on old projects has risen and secondly businesses are starting to see old data as a resource that can be mined for useful nuggets. So in recent years it has become common for businesses to retain all legacy data which then leads to data migration concerns.
Four common Gotchas
Here are four things that you should be wary of when planning any data migration:
- Quality of the data transfer
- Speed of the process
- Consulting costs
- Disruption
Quality of the data transfer
Your data is the most important thing, so you need to be sure that the transfer of the data is 100% reliable and nothing is lost.
Speed of the process
Whether the migration process leaves the legacy data where it is or makes copies into the new system, if you are using traditional methods like RoboCopy this can still take a considerable time. In addition, you may need to do this location-by-location to ensure that messages end up in the right places in the new system, and you will also need to allow time for checking and re-work.
Consulting costs
Data migration is good business for IT consultants. It usually requires skills that the customer does not have and involves a process that the customer typically has no experience of, so the vendor can set the price. If things don’t go to plan, the consultant can just extend their services, as the customer is committed and has little choice.
Disruption
You don’t want to find that you can only undertake the migration when staff are not using the old system, or that it all must happen on one day. Similarly, you will want to test the old and new systems side-by-side, so they will need to happily co-exist. You also need to ensure that deployment of the new software to staff is as easy as possible and can be done whilst they are still using the old software.
Data migration made easy
In part 2 we will explore how CloudFiler makes the process: easy, fast, reliable and at no additional cost to you.
“Ours is a small practice and we don’t have dedicate IT support in-house, so there was a concern that the deployment and data migration would require expert help and additional cost, but it was both simple and easy and the CloudFiler team called from time to time just to make sure that all was fine, which was refreshing and welcomed.” Sam, Casswell Bank Architects