Succeeding with data migration - part 1 - Creating a Migration Plan...
by Anne-Marie van Huyssteen
Project Manager & Workflow Consultant - Microworks (Pty) Ltd.
posted 10 June 2011
For IT managers, data migration has become one of the most routine—and challenging—facts of life. You’d think that any operation performed routinely would become easy, but not so with data migration. This article is the first of a two part series on data migration. The first article covers the planning phase and the second article focusses on executing the plan.
Planning
Although the ultimate goal of a data migration is to move data, a lot of upfront planning needs to happen prior to the move in order to ensure a successful migration. In fact, planning is the number-one success factor for any migration project, independent of the complexity. Not only does upfront planning help shorten the duration of the migration process, it also reduces business impact and risk—for example, application downtime, performance degradation, technical incompatibilities, and data corruption/loss. The migration plan—the end result of the planning phase —defines what data is moved, how it is moved, when it is moved, and approximately how long the move will take.
Business Impact Analysis
The objective of the business impact analysis is to identify the business and operational requirements that impact the migration process. Various stakeholders within the company need to be consulted to ensure that their requirements are integrated into the migration plan.
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IT staff and management defines available network bandwidth, allowable downtime, and migration schedule.
Database and system administrators define application and database requirements
Creation of Migration Plan
The migration plan, functions as the blueprint for the migration implementation, specifying customer expectations, defining project deliverables, and identifying the migration methodologies to be used. Creating a workable migration plan is often quite challenging. Different types of data may require different migration tools and strategies, and business and operational requirements—the downtime window—may require creative ways of moving the data. The migration plan components should include, but are not limited to:
Migration strategy and key activities
Dependencies
Required equipment and migration tools
Customer business, technical and operational requirements
Test plan
Verification procedures
Implementation schedule
Post implementation activities/responsibilities
Although the migration plan is the end deliverable of the planning phase, it is really a living, rather than static, document. Variables in the environment can change, or execution can lead to unexpected results, impacting the migration plan as documented.
Conclusion
Although one might be tempted to get a data migration done as soon as possible it is unwise to rush into such a high risk endeavor. This article gave a brief overview of the steps required during the planning phase and the importance of creating a migration plan. The second article in the series will discuss the process of executing the migration plan.
About the Contributor
Microworks (Pty) Limited is a leading specialist debt solution company in the Republic of South Africa. We deliver integrated consulting and debt collection software solutions to hundreds of companies across various industry sectors such as finance, education, healthcare, third-party collection, government and many more. We work with organizations to develop solutions and continually create innovative means to improve collection performance and enhance our customers' profitability.
Ms Anne-Marie van Huyssteen is a Workflow Consultant for Microworks.
