Thinking about moving your data to a new system or the cloud? You’re not alone. According to Forbes, the global cloud migration services market is projected to reach $69.73 billion by 2032, proving that data migration is becoming a key part of modern data and AI strategies. The data migration market is expanding rapidly due to cloud computing, with major players like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud leading the charge. This growth shows that more and more companies are embracing new technologies and migrating their data to stay competitive and future-ready.
Whether you’re upgrading your tech stack, switching platforms, or finally ditching outdated tools, data migration is a big step, and one you don’t want to take blindly.
The good news? With a solid data migration strategy, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. A clear data migration plan can help you avoid common mistakes, minimize downtime, and ensure everything runs smoothly from start to finish.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to build a reliable data migration strategy. You’ll learn why planning your migration matters, what migration approaches exist (and how to choose the right one), and the 10 key steps to make your migration a success. Let’s dive in.
Why You Need a Data Migration Strategy
The data migration process appears simple at first glance, but it becomes more complex for businesses that daily collect large volumes of data on their business performance, customers, internal processes, and more. A migration plan involves allocating the necessary resources and tools for data migration and organizing the work process beforehand. By planning data migration, you will know for sure how to distribute the resources (budget, time, people, tools, data) to reach the best result.
Also, by having a data migration strategy, you’ll be able to evaluate the results of your work objectively. It allows you to assess the effectiveness of the chosen approach and ensure data integrity throughout the process. These insights can then inform and improve future data migration efforts.
In the next section, we’ll explore the subtleties of developing a strong data migration plan and the benefits it can bring to your business.
Main Ways to Plan a Successful Migration Process
There can be many reasons why businesses decide to migrate their data from one location to another. Here are the most common ones:
- Businesses plan to modernize their system and find a more intuitive, secure, and modern solution for data storage and management.
- Their business keeps scaling, and it becomes impossible to manage the data with the existing tools and preserve data integrity.
- Companies expand their toolset and improve their digital ecosystem by adding new solutions that are incompatible with the existing data storage system and management tools.
- Businesses want to move their data from one or multiple locations to a centralized, all-in-one solution. This way, they will get access to insightful analytics on their business as a whole.
- They want to move from on-premises to the cloud to improve the performance, efficiency, and security of business operations.
- Companies aim to merge their activities by moving the source data to a new location where it will be stored, managed, and manipulated in a role-based way, while maintaining data integrity throughout the process.
Based on these reasons, businesses choose between different data migration approaches. There are 2 main strategies for data migration strategy development: the big bang and trickle. Let’s discuss them in more detail:
1. Big Bang approach
Under this approach, you migrate all your data at once from the source system to the target system. One of the main benefits of big bang data migration is fast implementation. However, it requires pausing your operations and dedicating uninterrupted time to the migration process to maintain data integrity throughout the transfer.
All systems involved in this type of migration are offline until the process completes. This means your end users and employees won’t have access during this downtime. To minimize disruption, many choose to schedule big bang migrations during public holidays, weekends, or off-hours when customer demand is low.
DevOps teams often play a crucial role in coordinating these migrations, ensuring smooth automation and monitoring to reduce risks and speed up recovery if issues arise.
This approach is often favored by small businesses with manageable data volumes, as they can migrate everything in one go without impacting their overall performance or risking data integrity.
2. Trickle approach
Trickle migration is the process of transferring your existing data, which involves breaking the migration down into several phases. Each phase is performed according to the data migration plan, scope, and timeline. As a rule, the migration phases are subdivided so that they are not overloaded with an intensive workload.
Breaking the data migration strategies down into smaller sub-processes enables a business to keep functioning without pausing operations and systems. A business is at work and experiences zero downtime (or minimal downtime). The data is also subdivided into parts, and these data pieces are migrated one by one.
Compared with the big bang approach, the drawback of the trickle method is that it takes more time as the migration is done gradually. However, implementing the trickle approach reduces the possibility of game-changing errors as you keep control over the processes and can adjust them in real-time. Rigorous data migration testing during each phase ensures data integrity and helps identify issues early, preventing costly mistakes.
Forbytes recommends implementing this approach if you have a lot of data collected and stored across systems. This way, you will minimize the risk of data loss and crashes and reduce downtime. As data migration experts, we can help you with data migration and provide you with support and maintenance essential for keeping your systems up and running.
Data Migration Made Easy: 10 Key Steps to Follow
Here are the main steps in the data migration strategy. Sure, each of them can be changed or adjusted to the needs of a particular business. What’s more, your software engineering partner will analyze whether you need to add or remove some of the steps in the data migration project.
Below, you can see the data migration plan flow diagram with the main steps outlined.
1. Identify the data locations.
The first step in the data migration plan is to make a list of all data locations where you store and manage your data. This can include various data analytics tools, management systems, ERP systems, and more. This inventory will help you choose the right data management formula to securely and efficiently store and handle all your data in the new system. Additionally, understanding your data locations allows you to design effective data transformation strategies to ensure your data is properly formatted and optimized during the migration process.
2. Identify the data formats, sensitivity, and types.
Audit the existing data your business collects. Identify the data formats and types you plan to migrate, and evaluate their relevance and accuracy. As part of your data migration planning, also consider potential data migration challenges and assess the sensitivity of the data. This will help your software development partner create a tailored risk management strategy that ensures data security and compliance throughout the migration process.
3. Define the data migration type.
When planning your database migration, it’s important to define the type that best fits your goals and systems. You can choose between a one-time transfer of historical data or set up ongoing data integration from various sources and platforms.
With the second option, your data stays up to date through automatic synchronization, whether daily, weekly, or at custom intervals within a centralized, all-in-one solution. This approach is especially useful if you’re dealing with constantly changing datasets or multiple systems. It also supports your big data strategy by ensuring consistent data flow and enabling better monitoring of data across platforms in real time.
4. Define the project’s goals
You need to have a clear understanding of what to expect from data migration. Make a list of project goals and identify how the data migration project is supposed to improve your business operations. For each decision, there should be a purpose. Set measurable goals on how data migration can help you improve your KPIs or ease and secure data management. A robust data migration plan will align these goals with your overall strategy and contribute to data-driven development. So, you’ll make smarter business decisions based on accurate, accessible data.
5. Define the project’s scope
After you have collected all the information about the data your business stores, you can move on to defining the project’s scope. If you have no technical background, you’ll possibly need the help of a data migration specialist. Together, you will define the scope, budget, team composition, and data migration tools.
Forbytes has experience dealing with data migration projects. Our recent case study demonstrates the data migration results we delivered to one of our big ecommerce clients. Our task was to lead the data migration process from start to finish. We had to plan out, perform, manage, and configure the regular data migrations. Besides, we also performed the migration of historical data.
Being a large eCommerce enterprise with more than 250 stores, our client was collecting vast volumes of siloed data. The systems where the source data was stored and collected were not connected to each other. This complicated the process of insight generation and made it hard for the customer to see the overall picture of business trends and performance.
As a result of thorough migration planning and execution, we migrated all the client’s source and target data to a secure warehouse and set up daily data synchronization across all the channels they use. We also connected the centralized data storage to insightful BI systems that transform raw numbers into visually appealing charts and user-friendly reports.
Beyond this project, we’ve completed numerous initiatives in business solution development, digital management, and digital transformation. We invite you to explore them below.
In this data migration step, you should also decide on the target system by comparing the options and defining their strong and weak sides. After you choose the target system and have a deep knowledge of the source systems, you can estimate the approximate duration of the project.
The less disruptive the migration process is, the more time it may take. However, if you can afford to pause some business operations for the sake of quicker migration, the project can be completed sooner. Throughout the process, it’s also important to prioritize data security to ensure that sensitive information is protected during transfer and storage. As an experienced data migration company, we can develop a non-disruptive software migration plan that helps you avoid financial losses, protect your data, and maintain continuous business operations.
6. Prepare the data backup
To prevent data loss when implementing data migration strategies, you need to prepare a data backup before starting the process to transfer data from one place to another. This ensures your data is safe and recoverable at any point. If data corruption or loss occurs during the migration, you’ll be able to restore all your information quickly and continue operations without major disruptions.
7. Test the migration tools
If you are migrating large volumes of data, make sure you choose the right data migration tools and test them in advance. To do this, take different data types and formats and try to migrate them from the source to the target system using the selected tools. Ensure there are no data duplicates, check how the tool processes your requests, and verify that no data loss or errors occur during the transfer. Proper testing is a key step toward a successful migration, giving you the confidence to proceed with the next phase of your data migration plan.
8. Execute the migration
At this step of a data migration plan, turn to the project plan you developed with your technical team. The step involves migrating data from one source to another. Make sure that the data is cleansed and transformed into the correct format if needed. Load the clean data to the target system and double-check everything. Careful execution at this stage is essential for a successful data migration plan, ensuring data quality, consistency, and smooth system performance after the transition.
9. Check how the final system performs
By analyzing the target system’s performance, you will ensure that the two systems connect in the right way. In case there are any connectivity issues, your technology partner will help you fix them and prevent all risks. Including this evaluation in your data migration plan allows you to proactively address potential integration challenges, ensure compatibility with your source data, and support a smooth transition.
10. Ensure support and maintenance
Support and maintenance services are essential to ensure everything in your system runs smoothly after a database migration. Whether it’s an on-premise transfer or a cloud migration, real-time data updates and synchronization can occasionally lead to unexpected issues. To prevent disruptions or fix them quickly, make sure to audit the results of your migration process as part of your post-migration efforts. If you discover any data gaps or errors, you can restore the missing information from your backup and maintain your system’s integrity.
Need help with your data migration strategy? Contact us, and we’ll help you create a plan tailored to your business needs.
Top Best Practices for Smooth Database Migration
Here are some general pieces of advice to help you with migration planning and execution:
- Your technical team should cooperate with the operations team. This is essential in order to understand how data is leveraged in your company and what data management difficulties should be resolved with data migrations.
- Improve the quality of data before migrating it. For this, you will need to cleanse the data, change the format, restructure it, etc. This will help you make sure that you do not migrate all the data problems along with the data itself.
- Do not overload the tools and legacy system with data. If you store a lot of unnecessary or unapplicable data, there is no point in transferring it from one system to another. Instead, try to make a consistent analysis of data-related processes in your company. In our recent article, you can learn more about secure data migration tools and their use cases.
- Do not switch the system till you fully test the target system and validate that it works smoothly.
Get Expert Data Migration Services with Forbytes
Our 10-step guide is designed to help you manage the data migration process smoothly, without errors or data loss. That said, executing a successful migration often requires more than just a checklist; it takes hands-on technical expertise.
At Forbytes, our data engineering team has the skills and experience to handle complex migrations, tailor software migration plans to your specific business needs, and ensure everything runs securely and efficiently. From planning and transformation to real-time syncing and post-migration support, we’ve got you covered.
For over 12 years, we’ve been helping companies worldwide unlock growth, improve performance, and make smarter decisions through reliable tech solutions.
Need help with data migration? Let our experts guide you through it. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.
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