Businesses keep moving into the new landscape with vast data overloading every enterprise. And the need to keep that data under control is growing more and more pressing. Unfortunately, many organizations even avoid discussions of their data migration. When things become too challenging, and migration is seen as the only way out, it is time to prepare a data migration checklist.
Data migration is a burning issue for enterprises.
Instead of kicking a can down the road, you, as an executive, should develop a plan for migrating your current held desk platform data. It is imperative to preserve its integrity and accessibility for easier data management in the new solution. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of planning significant changes like this for enterprise longevity and customer loyalty.
To comply with the services or products evolution and the number of customers growing, you need to input, store and manage data according to the rules set in the business strategy. The accessibility of data within a large enterprise can streamline the decision-making processes and unlock higher work efficiency. So, a successful help desk migration will pay off shortly.
The reasons for migration vary from company to company. Every business faces its challenges and factors that spur moving data over. Nevertheless, an enterprise data migration will have shared principles. To avoid failures such as poor organization, exceeding the allocated budget, or failing to meet the deadline, you should set up a data migration checklist and insure yourself against possible woes.
Data migration checklist for an enterprise
If your company decides to switch to a new help desk platform, you should set achievable goals regarding the timeline, resources, and budget. Here is a three-part migration checklist to make the help desk switch successful and effectively run the target software afterward.
Part 1. Strategic planning
1.1 Meet the stakeholders’ expectations. Before starting, conduct meetings with key stakeholders, support and sales team reps (the migration might impact them), and the tech team which will participate in the migration. Thus, stakeholders should get a brief outline of the process, and the departments will be able to present their essential needs and capabilities, which should be considered.
1.2 Budget and timeline. It would be best if you started defining the scope to ensure proper resource allocation. The estimates also should include the time and costs of the existing data audit, “cleaning,” and developing good mapping. Besides, your deadlines must be realistic and set by internal and external (if you are going to use third-party services for migration) dependencies.
1.3 Every detail is essential. There are many aspects to take into account before diving into the initiative. For example, at the planning stage of your enterprise help desk migration, involve all employees dealing with the new software. This may reveal more dependencies and requirements for the process.
1.4 Security matters. Apart from the enterprise data, you will also move customers’ records. Without compromise, choose the most secure migration method to avoid any records leakage.
Part 2. Your enterprise data inventory
2.1 Data audit will help you to define all possible data sources and reveal the missing records before you kick off the migration. If it is done at an early stage, you can get quite tangible benefits, like the following:
Full data visibility may help your team identify potential problems that were hidden.
Analyzing all source data will help improve the planning and mapping of migration requirements.
Business decisions to migrate enterprise data will be based on facts, not assumptions.
Knowledge about all data sources will specify the records types in the destination help desk more accurately and influence the migration speed.
2.2 Selecting the data for migration. Despite the structure, type, or format, you should validate your migration data based on the following criteria:
- relevance
- accuracy and objectiveness
- integrity and logic
- consistency and is easy to understand
- completeness
- validity for business parameters
- timeliness and availability upon request
- accessibility
This takes extra time, but it will bring you improved corporate performance, increase your competitive advantage, maximize ROI from enterprise apps, reduce risks, delays, and unexpected costs, as well as improve customer service and the ability to meet goals.
2.3 Full data backup. Before initiating records transfers, back up the existing data to eliminate any chances of data loss during or after the migration process.
Part 3. Performing data migration
3.1 Select the right way to migrate. You can migrate your help desk data in a couple of ways - your in-house tech team performs a custom migration, or you use a third-party API migration service. Due to the vast volume of data, unfortunately, CSV file transfer isn’t an option for big companies and enterprises.
So, it becomes vital to decide on the most appropriate migration option. On the one hand, your team is best aware of the records and software performance. But on the other hand, they will be distracted from their primary responsibilities and focus mainly on the help desk migration. Moreover, they might be unfamiliar with tasks of this kind and the target platform. Hence, it may take quite a long time to move company data. It may take six months or even more, yet there are many dependencies (the number of employees who will write the code, their proficiency level, the QA team testing the code, and later the migration results, etc.)
3.2 Requirements for a third-party service. While comparing various help desk migration options, you must identify whether the third-party service meets your requirements. First of all, check the following:
- the cost of service,
- security level,
- data mapping options,
- dealing with customizations that your company needs,
- terms of service, SLA, and deadlines.
3.3 API-based Helpdesk Migration in action. Let’s illustrate how you can transfer business data using an automated service. The service uses API to extract and input your data, so there are no risks of interference - everything is done automated and securely. Besides, your support team can keep working as usual while the data is moved to a new platform. You will have a dedicated support agent who will keep you updated on the process. A single drawback of this migration method can be certain API limits of your source and target platforms.
The value of a data migration checklist
Every company has its reasons for migration, but the short checklist above aims to cover its essential aspects. Without planning, your data migration risks overrunning budget and timeframes or failure. To ensure a successful help desk platform switch, you should pay attention to these 3 things:
- a) run a full data audit of all viable data sources;
- b) improve data quality before migration. Under “improve,” read: restructure, standardize, cleanse, enrich, and remove duplicates;
- c) choose the most appropriate migration way and track the progress carefully.
Data migration is a complex task, yet thorough planning helps to make it more predictable and allows you to get ready with a backup plan in case something goes wrong. To make your help desk migration successful, don’t neglect your business goals and employees’ insights, and encourage collaborative work on completing the data migration checklist.
Frequently Asked Questions
In short, Flyway and Liquibase are both Java-based database tools for versioning and refactoring. However, Liquibase can use SQL, XML, YAML, or JSON to define database changes, while Flyway only uses SQL. So, Liquibase is more flexible and powerful as it covers more deployment use cases and database changes.
Windows 10 includes a migration tool named Laplink. However, the software is only applicable to transferring user applications, files, and profiles. Besides, Laplink isn’t free of change; it requires at least 30$.
Data migration in AWS is a cloud service that enables the transfer of relational databases, NoSQL databases, data warehouses, and other types of data stores. You can use it to move your data into the AWS Cloud or between different combinations of on-premise and cloud setups.
The AWS pricing depends on the environment. The price for the primary environment starts from 100$ monthly. The price goes higher as the environment becomes more complicated. In addition, you need to count variable expenses for the webserver, DB server, DNS (Route53), etc.
The Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) is free to use and supports offline migrations. However, for 4 vCores, you need to pay 0.37$/hour.
AWS DMS supports MongoDB as a database source, primarily versions 3. x and 4.0. As for AWS DMS 3.4. 5, it supports MongoDB versions 4.2 and 4.4.
A server migration depends on various factors, such as the stability of the original server, the amount of data being migrated, or other unpredictable issues. Generally, a migration can take from a few days to a few weeks. That’s why it’s best to plan for the transfer process to take a few weeks.
