Data Migration and Data Security

Our data migration service can assist you in moving the data between systems/medium through assessment of cost and time factors, planning the entire procedure with our industry experience and systematic execution.

To perform (achieve) effective data migration procedure, the entire data needs to be reconstructed to the new system from the old system without any loss or errors during the migration process. Procedural data migration involves many phases depending upon the type of data that needs to be migrated. Data migration procedure can be broadly classified into four phases - Design of the entire process, extraction/cleansing, load and verification and are commonly repeated many times before the procedure is completed and data is ready on the new system.

This involves understanding and assessment of the system and evaluates :

1. Duration of the entire procedure to be completed Calculate the entire process duration to minimize the downtime and keep the applications available during the migration as much as possible.

2. Total time/man-hours required to perform the task Calculate the time required in terms of man hours to perform the tasks. Access which all processes can be implemented automatically or with minimal human interaction and justify the entire process.

3. Resources - Available versus to be procured Assess the resources to be used - both human expertise and programs/scripts in hand, and how effectively they can implement the migration.

4. Execute Plan Chart the entire process in a systematic way and allot tasks for the resources.

Extraction/Cleansing

The actual migration task is done here. The data is migrated either manually or through automated programs and cause minimum downtime and disruption to the existing application and its working. The data that is moved to the new system is extracted and the backups generated during the process are removed. There are several techniques used for this process. We have many functional programs to execute this tasks depending upon the nature of data to be transferred. As an example, the database data to be transferred will employ a different technique (maybe slower due to the nature of data) to transferring images.

Load

The data migrated is loaded into the new system appropriately at the right time. This will, on many occasions, require stopping the application running on the old system, and re-synchronizing the entire data once again. This phase will also require confirmation that all data is correctly and flawlessly moved to the new system and placed at the desired locations. Synchronization is typically a fast process, but again, it depends on the type of data being transferred.

Data verification

Perhaps, this is the most important and exhaustive phase of the whole process. Data verification determines the accuracy of data migration, its quality and whether it supports all aspects of the new system. The accuracy is determined by of the two techniques - full verification, where each unit of data (say, each file if the data is a file system or each table if the data is a database) that is transferred is checked for consistency and completeness by comparing with the original medium and partial verification, where samples of data is read back and verified against the original medium.