People migrate from one place to another, shift home, change the location, and notify everyone about their current address. With a change comes new challenges, including learning your way around a new neighborhood, finding convenient stores, and other means. Moving can be daunting and hectic since sometimes it is what you have to do and not what you want to do. Data migration is no different!
What is Data Migration?
As the name suggests, data migration means moving data from one device to another, which means changing the data’s physical location or the system. Data migration can be of any type, such as data profiling, data cleansing, and data validation. However, many times, data migration is confused with data conversion, but both the terms are different in meaning. Data conversion is the process of changing the format of a file from one form to another. Usually, it is one of the initial steps in data migration.
Another thing that is often mixed with data migration is data integration, in which data from various locations or applications are consolidated together to create a unified dataset. Therefore, it can be referred to as another step-in data migration like data conversion. To understand it better, here are three processes of how data migration works-
Process1: Storage Migration
When shifting data from an existing array to modern storage hardware, it is called storage migration. The advantage of doing so is, they increase performance and efficiency while decreasing costs. Besides, new software can have extended space and other storage features like cloning, snapshots, and more for your data.
Process2: Cloud Migration
Cloud migration occurs when the data is moved from a hardware-based storage array to a cloud-based storage solution. It is a reliable solution since data can be stashed on hardware in any remote physical location that can be accessed via the internet or any device. The data is sent to the data servers by data service providers.
Process3: Application Migration
Moving all the programs and data is called application migration. In this, data and applications could be either moved to hardware storage or cloud storage.
Why there is a Need to Migrate Data?
Various reasons contribute to data migration resulting in better long-term data safety. Here are a few reasons given below-
1) For Upgrading Systems-
As the technology changes, the system goes through various updates for its confinement and enhancement of multiple features. You can’t use outdated software and expect it to work efficiently with improved security forever. Besides, data can be lost if those old machines get corrupted due to physical reasons or data malfunctioning; then there will be no data left to shift.
To remain in the business, upgrading your systems is necessary. With the updated software, data remains safe and unapproached by the hackers who can steal data from outdated systems in a few seconds. Therefore, data migration is an integral part of upgrading as rolling information into new systems always requires data migration.
2) For Backing Up-
Data can be lost any time from your hard drives or other storages since everything comes with an expiry date. Therefore, a backup is always needed for the essential information to be stored safely. Backup could be having additional arrays, offsite storage or cloud storage. Whichever you choose, having a reliable backup option for your business can relieve you from the stress of data loss. Besides, you can always consult hard drive data recovery specialists you can retrieve your lost data and offer a robust backup system.
What are the Risks Involved in Migrating Data?
Many sorts of risks are involved when migrating data. If you lack the knowledge to do so, contact an expert since there are many ways data migrations can fail and some of them are mentioned below-
Risk1: Data Gravity
When a person creates a website, he needs to add various features to establish it. New data demands old information to work efficiently. Making specific changes in the site, and migrating data from one platform to another will affect every other part associated with it. This problem is called data gravity, which is encountered by all data migration.
Once a person operates a website, he comes to know that it cannot work alone effectively. They need to offer eCommerce to keep up with the competition in the market. Ass the website grows, more features get added, larger and larger chunks of data are produced with advancements in technology.
Therefore, data gravity falls in when data migration is done since the information being migrated is interconnected, and you cannot move one set of data without negatively impacting others.
Data gravity can be avoided if all the data sets are operated independently of those systems with which they are integrated. This may time consuming task but works effectively.
Risk2: Data Loss
Whenever you redefine data, whether to move, interact, convert or integrate it, you can risk data loss. Hence, such jobs should be only carried out by experts who have a profound knowledge of data handling since they come up with a thorough plan.
In case of data migration, ensure that you have a robust back-up schedule to protect your business from being a victim to data loss. If you lose data during data migration in the worst-case scenario, then consult a data recovery specialist to get your data back.
