Top 5 Ways to Optimize Data Migration Effort and Yield

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Data migration projects can be complicated, sensitive and costly at times. Most project managers involved in the process share a common concern – “My Project went over budget, over time.  And it’s a lot of manual effort that led to delivery delays and

Data Migration Tools

unexpected data loss.” The story remains same almost in every organization.

Data Migration Job is not a Simple Affair

Organizations, looking to extend their tool family or moving to other preferred tool solutions, often find ‘data migration’ an essential but hefty and risky process. There are threats related to data security, data loss, and data inconsistency due to human error. Items like monitoring migration status, maintaining data history and continuous reporting on successful and failed migration counts often decrease productivity and increases the cost of the project. Moving data between heterogeneous tools from different vendors makes it a more technically complex process.

Data Migration Tools are of Great Value

For any data migration project, leveraging automation is the first step to gain success. Using data migration tools can reduce manual intervention and accelerate your capability to move data with control and confidence.

However, just choosing any tool in the market may not meet your overall data migration objectives and the process efficiency you expect from it. Intuitive interface with easy adaptation is a must.

Following are the guidelines that would help you decide if a data migration tool you are evaluating is worth investing in or not.

1. Use Single Point Console to Migrate Everything

Migration of only records never satisfies the need of migration from one tool to the other. Beside migrations of records, an effective migration tool should also support migration of comments, attachments, and relationships associated with the records when moved to destination tools. This is the prerequisite to accomplishing successful data migration projects. Also, discarding the old tool often happens in phases. Keeping this in mind, your data migration tool should not only allow you to move objects from source tool to destination tool but also keep the data of both the tools in sync through bidirectional integration/synchronization support.

2. Use Drag-and-Drop Configuration for Tool Mapping

Simple and intuitive UI is the prerequisite for configuring an application with ease.Your data migration tool interface should allow you to set artifacts, fields, and user mapping between tools through simple mouse clicks.The more you can control data flow visually, the quicker and better you can configure them based on your migration requirements.

Fig: Single Interface for Bidirectional Field Mapping between Two Tools

3. Monitor Migrated Data and Migration Status in a Single Interface

The migration tool should provide a consolidated view of data being transferred between tools and the detailed migration statistics with time. For instance, a manager may wish to view all migration-related details in a single interface like artifact records by tool and project name, the total number of items migrated to-and-fro between tools, migration success and failure count, the reasons for failures, average queue time, average processing time and process completion hours. This gives a complete picture of what data being migrated from which tool of which project and their corresponding success and failure records.

Fig: Data Synchronization Health Tracking and Sync Details

4. Check Data Sanity between Tools -both Real-time and Historical

Project managers handling multiple data migration jobs often need to track sync action records from both historical and live data. This process ensures that there is no loss of records during transit. A data migration console that allows you to monitor data results between any numbers of projects for any date range can ensure total data sanity. Your data migration tool should automatically notify you for every transaction failure along with relevant details, helping you to determine the next course of actions.

Fig:  Data Sanity Check between Records of Two Tools

5. Generate On-screen Reports for Quick Analysis of Data Flow

Facility of chart-based graphical representation of data flow helps managers visualize the overall migration status. Not only status but a screen providing side by side view of records at source and destination helps managers to ensure data sanity between the pair of tools.

Fig: Graphical On-Screen Reports showing Syncing Performance

Kovair QuickSync is one such leading migration tool that provides users a single-point solution for data migration between a pair of best-of-breed, open source, legacy, or homegrown tools. The intuitive UI and built-in features of Kovair QuickSync simplify the process of tool mapping, project configurations, business flow setup, and real-time data monitoring. All these significantly increase process efficiency and improve management visibility for data migration projects. The list of popular tool integrations supported by QuickSync can be viewed here.

Conclusion

The above tool selection criteria will help you avoid the burden of entire migration effort no matter how complex the tools, the data migration flows and the data structures. A good tool can ensure easy and quick monitoring of migration process as well as provide availability of real-time and historical data for performance and speed analysis. Choosing the right migration tool can save you high on training and user adoption costs as well as help you enjoy minimum maintenance and maximum savings on infrastructure.

Just ask your tool vendor to arrange for a live demonstration and then evaluate their tool capabilities for an end-to-end solution.

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