
In today’s world, organizations significantly depend on data to make intelligent choices, boost modernization, and preserve a market advantage. But as data grows more abundant and complex, organizations are becoming increasingly concerned about protecting and making it available.
- Transferring data from one system or location to another is known as data migration, and it usually happens intending to modernize systems, amalgamate data centers, or shift to new platforms.
- The strategy and procedures for using migrated data (copies) to promptly restore access to data, apps, and IT resources during an outage are known as disaster recovery.
Some of the diverse types of loss-making outages are as follows:
- Natural disasters – like a fire, cyclone, or an earthquake
- Technological bottlenecks – incompatibilities/issues between systems
- Failures – hardware/machine, power, network, etc.
- Unaccounted human errors/threats
- Cyber-attacks – deliberate entry into secured systems by unauthorized parties
Understand the Demand for Data Migration
In the process of moving from on-premises IT infrastructure to a cloud or hybrid environment, data migration is a crucial step.
Migration forecasting based on more than 400 IT executives’ feedback:
Grasp the demand as Volterra’s global survey concludes that 97% of IT leaders planned to distribute workloads across two or more clouds to maximize resilience, meet regulatory and compliance requirements, and leverage best-of-breed services from different providers.
Data Migration Journey for Disaster Recovery and Backup?
Disaster recovery usually entails safely backing up and replicating important files and workloads to one or more secondary locations, also known as disaster recovery sites.
Data migration ensures that vital information is available and undamaged during the changeover. When it comes to disaster recovery, this means having current, accurate data easily accessible to reduce downtime and expedite the restoration of operations.
Let us examine a few use cases which describe the impact on various related IT verticals:
- IT Service Administration (ITSM) > Systems Failover/Failback: Azure advises you to comply with a wide range of security and privacy regulations in addition to securing your backup environment with built-in security for cloud and hybrid systems.
When a primary system fails due to a power outage, cyberattack, or other threat, operations are transferred to a secondary system through the widely used process known as failover in IT disaster recovery. The process of going back to the initial setup after regular operations have been resumed is known as a failback. - Cybersecurity > Regulatory Compliance: PwC’s Global Crisis Survey 2021 states that only 20% of organizations report their disaster recovery function is well integrated.
Through the process of simulating different disaster scenarios, organizations can detect possible vulnerabilities in their disaster recovery strategies and take proactive measures to achieve business resilience. Validation lowers the possibility of mistakes or inconsistencies that could impair business operations or regulatory compliance by ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the moved data. Regulations governing various industries specify where and how data must be stored and safeguarded. - Customer Relationship Management (CRM) > Client Retention: Google emphasizes that customers are rarely devoted to a business that goes offline during production hours.
Customers and investors may also leave due to the high-profile nature of cyberattacks, protracted outages or disruptions brought on. Brand damage may result in a company whose operations are difficult to resume. A robust disaster recovery plan is therefore essential. - Finance > Cost Benefits: According to IBM’s recent Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million – a 15% increase over the last 3 years.
Proceed to optimize your data migration methodologies better and reduce any indirect losses incurred during downtime caused due to an actual disaster. To maintain growth, resilience, and competitiveness, leaders are considering the cost transformation of today while dealing with the disruption and volatility of the current environment. - Data Management > Data Preservation, Archiving and Accessibility: In a recent article, IBM stated that businesses are under increasing pressure to maximize the value they derive from the ever-increasing amounts of data they generate.
Remember, garbage data begets garbage results! One of the most important aspects of migration planning is choosing the appropriate data migration solution. This should be considered from the outset of the data management plan (DMP) creation for data governance functions and disaster recovery planning.
How Should Disaster Recovery be Planned?
The following flowchart represents how you should go forth with a data migration strategy for disaster recovery:

Conclusion
With data migration through disaster recovery and backups, you gain the power of moving and combining datasets living in multiple sources. You can process and prune the data as per your requirements to meet the desired targets and maintain your market goodwill in case of any unplanned business disruption.
Implement data migration techniques using a single platform to oversee and operate the full migration dataset, enabling the aggregation, analysis, and deployment of on-demand critical data from various sources.