How to solve data migration challenges
Data integrity protection
When migrating data, there is a risk of data damage or loss, which can occur as a result of unintentional transmission failures. This also affects content-related and important meta information like retention periods, time stamps or IDs. Therefore, during the data migration, companies must ensure that the data to be migrated is identical to the data before the migration. This can automatically be verified by retaining hash values for example.
Compliance with regulatory requirements
In cases of data migration, companies must adhere to compliance regulations, data protection specifications and internal requirements. At European level, the GDPR requirements, amongst others, have a strong impact on data migrations – e.g. with a view of monitoring and logging data access as well as data integrity protection. The German GoBD rules require logging all processes and procedures of data retention in a procedural documentation. The Swiss GeBüV requires to ensure data completeness, validity, availability and legibility as well as logging the data migrations.
Due to the complex requirements, companies should take into account that the service provider or the relevant technical personnel has a deep knowledge and experience in compliance topics if a migration project is to be implemented.
Reduction of complexity and costs
Data migrations are often associated with pronounced complexity and high costs. Factors that may affect the migration complexity include the business applications involved and the deployed storage platforms the data is stored in. These circumstances require a good and well-thought-out planning and careful preparation of the migration. A proven process with clearly defined steps from data validation on the existing storage platform to the final and complete transmission to the new archive solution can solve this challenge. In addition, a well-planned procedure saves time and thus costs for data migrations.
Minimization of downtimes and disruptions of business processes
The data migration should be completed within as short a period of time as possible in order to minimize disruptions and downtimes of the source and target systems and thus to ensure smooth business operations. If the migration is undertaken in the background or if downtimes of business applications or the file storage are minimized, disruptions of business operations can almost entirely be avoided.
