Strategies for Businesses to Plan Cloud Data Migrations
Cloud data migration can incur significant costs and require substantial time investments from organizations. Additionally, data migration challenges, like security concerns and compliances, make this process complicated enough that the probability of mismanagement remains high. Thus, it is particularly important for businesses to properly strategize their migration and keep everyone educated to ensure a smooth transition. This blog post covers the top cloud data migration strategies that every business needs to consider. Read on!
- Pre-migration Assessment and Setting the Timeline
A pre-migration assessment forms the basis of an efficiently planned cloud data migration. The very first step is to analyze what data needs to be transferred and what not. There might be users who are no longer a part of the organization, or there might be data files that are not useful as per the current scenario. Thus, you need to segment the good and the bad.
Another crucial step of pre-assessment is to set a realistic timeline. You need to define feasible goals divided on a weekly/monthly basis, enabling you to efficiently implement the whole migration process. Usually, this is how a timeline looks for a smaller organization:
- Pre-assessment (Week 1–2)
- Batch 1 Migration (Week 3–4)
- Batch 2 Migration (Week 4–5)
- Delta Migration (Week 6–7)
- Post-Migration Validation (Week 8–9)
*We’ll talk about the significance of “Batch migration” in the later part of the blog.
2. Organization-wide Change Management Strategy
Every important change in an organization requires education. You need to ensure that the end-users are educated and comfortable with the new aspects of the new cloud platform you are migrating to. That is where change management strategy comes into play. Here’s what you can consider as part of the change management strategy:
- Organize webinars to ensure the proper spread of the word.
- Effective communication should be the core pillar of educating the end-user.
- Be open to feedback and resolve the issues being faced.
- Constantly measure and monitor the user-adoption metrics.
3. Creating Migration Batches for More Effective Migration
If the user base and the data to be transferred are huge in size, it is advised to segment the migration process into smaller batches. This helps in reducing the risk of errors, incorrect validation, and prospective delays. Additionally, the overall migration becomes less risky as the probability of the source/destination cloud API throttling reduces drastically.
4. Migrating Metadata and Other Features
Irrespective of the cloud suite you are migrating (to and from), you should know your requirements very thoroughly. Spend enough time to analyze your files and explore migrating features like file-sharing permissions, timestamps, version histories, shared links, external shares, and embedded links. A pre-planned and rightly decided move will make the migration much smoother for your organization.
5. Post-Migration Validation
Post-migration validation remains one of the core pillars of the cloud data migration process. Be careful and thorough with the migration reports to ensure you are not missing anything. Some important parameters include: number of users migrated, number of files transferred, time taken for the migration and the reason behind the conflicted files/folders.
6. Planning and Implementing Delta-Migration
Given the size of the data, the cloud migration timeline may extend to weeks, months and sometimes a year too, and thus, organizational operations continue without interruption. These ongoing operations lead to incremental changes in data that happen during or after the one-time migration. Delta migration is a solution to these incremental changes, as you can migrate the updated files/folders to the destination smoothly without wasting time on data that has been originally migrated. However, the delta migration also needs to be thoroughly planned as an organization might consider specific users/data to save cost and time.
In conclusion, cloud data migration holds significant importance and thus, it needs to be very thoroughly planned to ensure your organization does not have to suffer time loss and money wastage too. The above-mentioned strategies cover all the basics you need to consider before planning your cloud data migration. However, each organization has different goals and needs. Thus, plan accordingly!
CloudFuze revolutionizes the process of cloud data migration through an easy-to-use platform and professional guidance. They have a highly experienced and insights-driven migration team that assists you throughout the process to make it seamless. Contact CloudFuze to plan and implement a smooth cloud office migration.
