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Compliance, enabling data usage, and analytics are driving almost every IT and business organization to look for solutions to migrate and manage their business-critical data.
That, in turn, is driving a healthy data migration market. Industry experts expect the market to reach nearly $11.5 billion in 2022 and up to $22.8 billion by 2026.
Data migration features
Moving data from one place to another isn’t a simple endeavor. The lack of an adequate data migration strategy and flawed execution are most often the culprits.
Legacy data doesn’t always align with new systems. Bringing unnecessary data to new systems also wastes resources. But it is part of a growing need within businesses to modernize their data architecture. Unfortunately, as IT administrators move or protect data on-premises or in the cloud, it can become corrupted without the proper protocols in place. Human or machine errors or malicious attacks can occur as the data moves, compromising overall data integrity. That’s why data integrity will play a critical role in data management and data migration in 2022.
“If data is compromised, organizations risk having their projects delayed, completely halted, risk huge compliance fines, or face reputational damages to their organization,” said Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi. “Therefore, data management processes that uphold the value of customer data are more important than ever.”
Data migration tools, therefore, are moving beyond the simplicity of shipping data from one place to another. They are now incorporating quality assurance (IQA) functions, risk assessment processes, proper account management, and fortified security settings throughout the process.
Benefits of Data Migration
Data migration brings many benefits. Of course, it helps organizations place data where it needs to be. Instead of having to laboriously move specific data from an aging application and process it, so it can be read by a modern system, it often makes sense to move all the data permanently to the new system or into the cloud. This greatly speeds performance and makes it far easier to analyze legacy data.
Another benefit of data migration is the company may no longer be tied to skill sets that are outdated and hard to hire or acquire. If data is in COBOL or some older code, it can be difficult to do much with that data. Other enterprise or cloud-based systems or analytics apps often can’t do much with that data. By moving it to the cloud, or a modern application, it is opened up to a wider vista of possibilities.
Use Cases for Data Migration
The major use case for database migration is to enable businesses to adopt more modern data architectures that help them make better use of data, improve business decision making and leverage modern infrastructure like the cloud to improve operations and business outcomes.
John Kutay, director of growth and product at Striim, pointed out that there are three strategic ways companies can migrate databases and unique benefits associated with each. These include: big bang database migration, trickle database migration, and zero-downtime data migration.
Big bang database migration
Big bang migration transfers all data from one source system to a target database in a single operation at a single point in time. Often, it’s performed during a weekend or a scheduled downtime period.
The benefit of this strategy is its simplicity, as everything occurs in a time-boxed event. The tradeoff is downtime, which can be undesirable for organizations that run their systems 24/7.
Trickle database migration
Trickle migration follows an agile-type approach to database migration. It breaks down the migration into small sub-migrations, each having its own scope, deadlines, and goals. This way, it’s easier for the database migration team to confirm the success of each phase.
If any sub-processes falter, it’s common to only re-work the failed process. As a result, the lessons from the failure can be utilized to improve subsequent runs. That’s one of the reasons why it’s less prone to unexpected failures. The drawback is that trickle database migration takes more time. Since you have to run two systems simultaneously, it consumes more resources and effort.
Zero-downtime data migration
Zero-downtime migration replicates data from the source database to the target database. It allows the client to access and operate on the source database while the migration is in process. Benefits include less business disruption, faster migration, and minimal cost, especially when considering business impact and all-hands migration efforts.
Data migration providers
These are some of the top providers in the data migration market:
- Dell Technologies
- Ballard Chalmers
- Relevant Software
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- IBM
- Quest
- Citrix
- CommVault
