What is Data Migration? Guide to Data Migration Tools and Planning

Data migration is a one-time process of moving internal data from one storage system to another; This may involve preparing, extracting and, if necessary, transforming the data.

This may sound like data replication or data integration, but each process is different. Data replication is the periodic copying of data from one data source to one platform to another, whereas data integration combines data from different sources into a data warehouse destination or analysis tool.

Projects that require Data Migration range from upgrading servers to moving to a new data center and launching a new application to integrating the resources of the newly acquired company. Ideally, moving data to a new platform, location, or architecture can be accomplished without any data loss and with minimal manual data manipulation or re-creation.

Types of Data Migration Tools

Organizations can write their own data migration scripts or use on-premises or cloud-based tools. Self-Scripted Data Migration is a do-it-yourself in-house solution that may be suitable for smaller projects, but it doesn't scale well. On-premises tools work well if all the data is on one site. Cloud-based data migration tools may be a better option for organizations moving data to a cloud-based destination. IT professionals can write software to migrate data, but the process can be taxing and time-consuming. Hand-coding big data integration sometimes involves manual integration work and re-implementation of machine learning algorithms.

A better approach is to use data migration software. Software does the heavy lifting, but data engineers must still understand what data they are migrating, how much will be migrated, and the differences between source and destination platforms and schemas. They should define the migration strategy, run the migration, test the results and address any issues.

How to choose The Right Data Migration Tool

Proper planning is the most important part of any data migration effort and should include consideration of data sources and destinations, security and cost. Selecting a data migration tool is a key component in the planning process, and should be based on the organization's use case and business needs.

Data Source and Destination

The number and type of data sources and destinations are an important consideration. Self-scripting may be able to support any source and destination, but self-scripting is not scalable. It might work for small projects, but you probably don't want to end up coding data extraction scripts for hundreds of sources.

One caveat to on-premises tools is that supported sources and destinations may differ depending on the operating system your tool runs on.

Most on-premises and cloud-based data migration tools handle a wide variety of data sources and destinations. Cloud-based SaaS tools don't have OS limitations, and vendors automatically upgrade them to support newer versions of sources and destinations.

Reliability

Cloud-based data migration tools have almost 100% uptime due to their highly redundant architecture. It will be difficult to match that reliability with on-premises tools.

Performance and Scalability

Cloud-based migration tools perform exceptionally well. Compute power and storage in the cloud can be scaled to meet dynamic data migration needs. On-premises tools cannot automatically scale up and down as needed because they are limited by the hardware on which they run.

The Protection

Data migration tools may have to meet security and compliance requirements. This may rule out some cloud-based tools, but many are compliant with SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and other governance regulations.

Pricing

Many factors affect pricing, including the amount of data, the number and type of sources and destinations, and service levels. No particular type of data migration tool will always be the lowest cost solution for a given data migration project.

The cloud-based data migration tool has pay-as-you-go pricing. For most data migration projects, the cloud solution offers the best pricing; However, some pricing models can be a bit confusing. Some cloud services have a free tier that businesses may be able to take advantage of.

Getting started with Cloud Data Migration

Are you planning for data migration or replication? SpringTimeSoftware provides an easy-to-use ETL tool that can replicate or migrate data from sources to destinations; It makes the task of getting data for analysis faster, easier and more reliable, so businesses can get the most out of their data analysis and BI programs.

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