Data migration 

When does data migration become necessary?

The need for data migration can arise for a variety of reasons, such as:

• When upgrading an old system, data must be migrated.
• The data must be synchronised between the old and the new system so that they can be compared, thus ensuring that the old can be exported.
• Data from the previous application must be integrated into a new business application.
• Data must be transferred from several different systems to a common system (e.g. in the case of an organisational change).
• The IT platform will be moved to the cloud to help with scalability, which requires data or application migration.
• Data must be moved from an existing server to a new or existing storage system, or to a centralised repository.

Data migration process

In general, the data migration stages are as follows:

• Planning - identifying existing data sources, defining the requirements of the new system and how the data will be converted.
• Extraction - extracting all data from the existing source(s).
• Cleaning - reviewing data and identifying data issues, removing redundant or duplicate data, identifying incomplete data and finally correcting inaccurate data.
• Upload - uploading the cleaned data to the new system, in one step or in stages.
• Authentication - testing the data and confirming the success of the upload.

Quality assurance

Before we start, let's look at how your current system works, what the data looks like, how it is used and where it is stored.

We understand what you use your data for.
We assess the information environment, understanding how, where and by whom data is used. We will also ascertain whether different uses of data might become possible in the future.

Ensuring data security (especially in legacy systems).
There is no point in moving data that you don't use, is duplicated or incorrect. We are conducting a comprehensive quality assessment to ensure that standardisation supports users now and in the future.

Continuous validation.
Correcting errors after migration is a costly exercise. When migrating data from an old system to a new one, we build a visual prototype of the new system exactly as you saw it in your plans; changes can be made at this stage of the process.

Testing with end users.
We encourage our partners to share the prototype with their end-users so that they and other decision-makers can perform a User Acceptance Test (UAT) on the final migration, similar to the in-process validation, to ensure compliance.