The fact that over 80% of data migration efforts face hiccups, in terms of time or cost overruns, calls for comprehensive analysis. To that end, in this post we aim to understand a few key challenges faced by companies in the hope that you will be better prepared to anticipate and tackle them during your migration. Also take a look at our cloud migration checklist.

Here are some of the major challenges faced by migration architects:

1. Unclear Strategy

Depending on your business objectives, decide on whether you can strategically afford to implement a big bang migration or a trickle migration. A big bang migration requires holding off on all your operations while you extract the data from its source, process it and transfer it to the cloud. Trickle migration is an incremental type of migration where only parts of your system will face downtime in order for you to migrate the required data successfully. However, depending on how interconnected your systems are, trickle migration could pose security issues.

Ensure that your strategy also has enough wiggle room for optimization along the way. Work on a tight feedback loop by monitoring relevant migration KPIs to ensure that you are on the right track. If you find yourself stuck, stay open to course corrections in your strategy for greater flexibility in fixing issues.

2. Complex Data Sources

Ensuring seamless connectivity between all your systems and databases after a migration requires a complete configuration of your pre-migration data. Watch out for easy-to-miss spelling changes, duplicates, missing information and formatting issues. Also pay attention to the changes to be made to the data in older databases. Shifting them to newer systems might require formatting changes. Dedicate some time towards data normalization – the process of finding all the places in your CMS where the same data is stored, and shifting it to one central location.

3. Improper Budgeting

As a result of not identifying potential hidden costs, companies often report cost overruns while migrating data. In most cases, the primary cause for increased migration-spend is time – the longer it takes to migrate data, the more expensive it gets. A few other factors can be the cost incurred due to data loss or corruption, and running into unforeseen infrastructure problems which call for the usage of additional software solutions.

At CloudNow Technologies, we understand the complexity that is associated with planning and executing data migration. Our team of experts can take on the entire hassle for you and ensure that your migration happens smoothly without hindering your work. To know more about our data migration and cloud migration services, get in touch with us now.