COMPANY NEWS by Brad Rosairo, Director, Asia-Pacific, BitTitan: Anyone who has moved a household knows that without preparation and planning, it can be a chaotic experience. There are different considerations when moving regarding what to keep, how to pack your various possessions, how to prioritise what to move, and how to protect your valuables.
A good moving company understands that the move itself isn’t the most important part of the operation. The company is judged by how efficiently and safely every possession and piece of furniture arrives at its destination.
Moving can be a useful metaphor to understand data migration, as not every data migration is the same. However, every migration requires careful strategy, thoughtful planning, a detailed migration checklist, and communication throughout. Below, we explore the reasons that companies undertake a migration, how companies prepare for the move, and look at three common migration strategies.
Reasons to migrate data
Companies have various reasons for migrating data, which may require different migration strategies. Common reasons for a migration include:
- Moving to the cloud – Cloud adoption has risen over the last decade and cloud migrations have accelerated in the past year, in large part because of the need to support secure remote work during the pandemic.
- Mergers and acquisitions – M&A activity has accelerated, with high-stakes migrations usually capping off a fairly intense IT project, as merging companies consolidate data. These migrations need to be planned carefully to assure a positive experience as the companies combine.
- Consolidating or decoupling systems – As organisations evolve, they may find it necessary to combine or segregate data for IT management purposes. This could be based on region or subsidiary, for example.
- Moving to a new platform – The large number of companies adopting Microsoft Teams has resulted in migrations to take advantage of Teams’ robust collaboration offerings.
- Saving money – As IT organisations look for ways to contribute to the bottom line, many find opportunities to lower expenses by shifting to new platforms. For example, BitTitan is seeing more companies move from GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 as a cost-saving move.
- Improving security – This year’s news about bad actors exploiting on-premises Exchange vulnerabilities has renewed the urgency to migrate from on-prem to more secure cloud environments such as Exchange Online.
In each scenario, organisations must consider data-handling strategies to inform the ideal migration options they should pursue.
