When organizations are changing applications, they might need to migrate their data from their legacy applications to the new application, to do that they would need to migrate their data.
What is data migration?
Data migration is the process of moving data from one software application to another.
Data migration is an important step in implementing new applications. Successfully transferring the organizational data from one system to another helps ensure that there is no data loss, improves software adaptation and helps improve the projects success.
Data migration to the cloud
Organizations are transitioning to the cloud applications due to their numerous advantages which include cost effectiveness, economies of scale and improved performance.
But to ensure that a smooth transition, they might have to migrate the organizational data from their on premise applications or legacy applications such as excel spreadsheets.
Are there different types of data migration activities ?
There are numerous types of data migration activities and they include the following:
- Cloud Migration: based on the application that you are migrating, you can use an online migration tool to migrate the data.
For example an organization might want to migrate their SharePoint 2013 On-premise data to SharePoint 2019.
To do this, they might decide to use the Microsoft SharePoint migration tool, the tool allows you to specify what you want to migrate and then it would automatically migrate all the data to the new SharePoint 2019 site.
- Storage migration: This is the transfer of data from an old storage system to a new storage system. Examples of storage migration include migrating your storage from Windows Server to Microsoft Azure.
How do you migrate data ?
There are 3 steps involved in data migration and they are
- Extract data: Data extraction is the process of extracting the data from the source application. The extracted data might be disorganized and poorly structured so it would need so work before it can be migrated into the new system. Data can be taken from one or more sources or systems, so one of the task in the extraction data activity involves locating and identifying relevant data, then preparing it for processing or transformation.
- Transform data : Once the data has been extracted, it is ready to be transformed. The transformation activity involved sorting, organizing and refining the data. For example the data should be analyzed to removed missing values and duplicate entries.
- Load data : Once the data has been transformed, it is then delivered to the new application or device for storage and analysis.