Data Migration Mistakes Small Businesses Should Be Aware of

There can be no business that has not made any mistake. Companies and mistakes go hand-in-hand. However, no business can make mistakes as its norm. It has to find ways to rectify mistakes. And the first step of correcting mistakes is to identify them.

Data migration is a common process that businesses undertake. At times, a firm needs to migrate or transfer its digital data from its old to a new platform for varied reasons, from eliciting a technical advantage to compulsions.

Analogous to other business processes, businesses often make mistakes while migrating data, especially the small and medium enterprises. So, they should acquaint themselves not only with the mistakes but also how to avoid them

The following are some of such mistakes and the ways to keep them at bay:

Moving Data to the Cloud Without a Strategy

For small and medium businesses without the necessary in-house expertise, it might seem that moving data to the cloud is an easy affair as they cannot discern the nitty-gritty associated with the migration. There has been a growing trend among such businesses to migrate data to the cloud to keep up with the competition. But, the companies can lack the technical staff to deploy and run IT on-premises. So, the only option left for such businesses is to run their systems in the cloud. If they are already using the cloud, then storing their data in the cloud is not always optimal as extracting huge files from the cloud multiple times a day does not always work well. Performance issues are one of the critical hindrances for small and medium firms in using cloud services.

Latency becomes a big issue due to the presence of the internet between data and the production environment. When data gets to a certain size, it poses difficulty in moving it between different locations. Therefore, they can achieve faster data movements with on-premise data storage.

Not Correcting Data Fields Beforehand

If you believe that you will find all your business problems going away after migrating data, you must be staying in a fool’s paradise. You will see that you have only migrated your old problems to a new system after migrating data.

The reality is that there can be a lot of garbages in your existing databases, such as overlapping information, inconsistent data, multiple records with the same names spelled differently, etc. So, you should clean and correct the existing data fields before you move the data. As such, migration also presents an excellent opportunity for businesses to clean up their data stores.

No Disaster Recovery Plan

Your existing data can be scattered and not reside in a single place. Some of your data may reside on-premise, in a public or private cloud, and in a hybrid environment. The presence of your data poses complications during data migration that you have to address. As such, you cannot escape providing continuity of data, regardless of where your data resides, before you actuate migrating data. When your data stays in multiple locations, data migration dynamics also change from the condition of data residing at a single location. So, data recovery comes into the picture.

It is about protecting your workloads and providing continuous service availability, regardless of whether your data is on-premise or in the cloud.

Not Assessing the Time and Effort

It is needless to say that no business can waste neither time nor effort. So, it makes sense for companies first to assess the amount of time and effort to carry out the data migration. One of the biggest mistakes small and medium businesses make is not understanding the associated challenges with the data migration process. They should adequately understand the involved workloads, data quantity, connectivity speeds, and other factors beforehand to formulate a plan accordingly.

Businesses, especially the small and medium ones, often fail to clean the involved data and figure out the time needed to convert data from different sources into the same format. Besides, they also fail many times to identify dependencies among data to be migrated.

It is good to run a pilot data migration to a nonproduction server to figure out the time and effort required for the actual migration.

 Migrating Data Alone

There are many data migration tools available in the market. But firms cannot rely only on the tools to conduct a full data migration. As there are many processes involved in data migration, it will help if the firm deploys a vendor or service provider to correctly accomplish the task, from the initial hardware evaluation to migrating it.

External vendors have competent technical teams to assess your current network configuration and make required adjustments, if necessary, to conduct the data migration smoothly. However, your in-house IT team may not have such expertise.

Conclusion

You have now come to know that data migration is not a straightforward affair. It involves a sequence of complicated steps. Also, small and medium businesses make many mistakes that they need to avoid for obvious reasons. This article serves as a valuable guide for you to know what can be your possible mistakes and ways to avoid them.