What is a data migration?
Data migration
As of 2011, "nearly 40 percent of data migration projects were over time, over budget, or failed entirely."[1][3] As such, to achieve an effective data migration, proper planning is critical. While the specifics of a data migration plan may vary—sometimes significantly—from project to project, the computing company IBM suggests there are three main phases to most any data migration project: planning, migration, and post-migration.[2] Each of those phases has its own steps. During planning, dependencies and requirements are analyzed, migration scenarios get developed and tested, and a project plan that incorporates the prior information is created. During the migration phase, the plan is enacted, and during post-migration, the completeness and thoroughness of the migration is validated, documented, closed out, including any necessary decommissioning of legacy systems.[2] For applications of moderate to high complexity, these data migration phases may be repeated several times before the new system is considered to be fully validated and deployed.