Migration Projects
What is migration and why is it important?
In business IT, migration is the process of moving masses of data from one place to another. It’s sort of like a digital version of an office move: instead of moving physical objects between different buildings, you’re moving information, applications and/or IT processes from one place to a target system. In other words, you’re moving data from storage system or computing environment to another.
Depending on exactly what information you need to move, and where you need to move it to, this represents a different type of migration project:
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Cloud migration
If you need to move some or all your digital business operations to a new cloud service, this involves what’s known as a cloud migration. Most often, this involves moving your data from your on-premises infrastructure to a data centre run by your cloud provider. But the term also covers migration projects where you need to move your data from one cloud service to another.
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Server migration
As the name suggests, this involves moving information stored on one server to another server. This can involve moving information between on-premises servers – for example if you want to replace some old and/or outdated hardware with a newer, more powerful model with more storage. And it can also mean moving data from a physical server in your office to one that’s hosted remotely – for example, in a data centre run by a cloud provider.
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Email migration
This is the process of moving all your company’s emails from one email client to another, including all the associated data these messages contain, like embedded images and attachments.
What are the risks of a migration?
Moving files on a computer is usually a quick, drag-and-drop operation. But unfortunately, no migration is ever quite that simple: the sheer volume of information most companies have – and the fact that so much of this data is unstructured – means it takes a lot more time and thought than you might imagine.
In any migration plan, you’re moving information and data from one place to the other. This makes any migration a data migration project. And if you don’t have the right safeguards in place, it can be a nail-biting process. Because even the most straightforward migration can run into problems. And the consequences of a failed migration can be devastating, ranging from delays and interruptions to your business, to a reduction in data quality and data integrity — or even catastrophic data loss.
Plus if you don’t plan it right, you risk moving a lot of information you don’t really need. Migrating data without sorting through it first is like moving into a new house without turning out the boxes in your attic: you’ll end up bringing a lot of junk with you, so the move itself is slower and it’s harder to locate the stuff you actually need.
How can Dr Logic help?
Whatever type of migration project you need to undertake – cloud, server or email – we can support you every step of the way – using state of the art tools and a tried and tested approach to make the process smooth and safe, and your information easier to find and use after the move.
Scoping out your migration project
We’ll start by talking to you about the information you want to migrate – not just how much there is, but how it’s structured and how you want to use it. We’ll then work out how much storage you need, both now and in the future.
Preparing your data to migrate
And we’ll also give your data a spring clean: we’ll help you work out what to get rid of and help to organise everything else better, for example by fixing the file permissions and providing an archiving system.
The move
To make the migration itself as risk, stress and hiccup-free as possible, we’ll take all the proper precautions ahead of time – not just by backing everything up, but by checking all those fiddly, all-important details like whether your files follow the right naming conventions and whether the servers can talk to each other properly.
Are you looking for help migrating your business information, apps and systems? Need help with a data migration planning process? Get in touch to find out how we can make the process as painless, and risk free, as possible.
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