Data Migration Services | Boosting Efficiency and Effectiveness

New technology adoption means new possibilities for a business. And this is the major reason organizations are speeding up their digital transformation journey using data migration services to create more value for each customer and institutionalize efficiencies within their businesses.

Whether it is setting up a new IT infrastructure or revamping a legacy system, modernization has helped businesses in achieving exponential growth. The competitive world- now spurred by the pandemic than ever- has given the organizations some of the unavoidable reasons to build digital capabilities for smooth business operations and excellent customer experiences.

This blog will help you understand the importance of Data Migration in creating efficiency and effectiveness across all the business functions.

Why is Data Migration Performed?

Data has become a crucial part for any organization to continuously add and create values for a business. Applications using intensive databases demand constant updates to support new features and rapid scale. Here comes data migration into the picture to fix the escalating problems as business users grow.

For example, H+K International, an award-winning supplier of kitchen equipment, has migrated their important data assets from the DB2 database to a new MS SQL database architecture. The company was using a conventional ERP system that was causing business to slow down. With the modernization, the company is now able to act smartly by gathering insights on its products and customer behavior.

Might Helpful: Data Migration Challenges and Strategies

Given below are some other triggers for data migration:

• Division or acquisition of a business unit that prompts process change within the organization

• Legacy application modernization to boost performance and efficiency

• Shift to a centralized database to improve decision making

• To adapt advanced technological changes and others, including market practice, operational efficiency, regulatory requirement to provide excellent customer service

• To save operating costs by streamlining the application process

• Moving to the cloud for better flexibility and scalability

How data migration is creating efficiency and effectiveness

Data migration involves moving a database to another application, storage or the cloud to support additional features and upgrades. It plays an instrumental role in optimizing organizational strategies. These include agility in performing business operations and improvisation in the overall performance of the business.

Helpful Read: Overcoming Digital’s Biggest Roadblock- Legacy System

Here are some important benefits of data migration that help organizations create efficiency.

Add Flexibility & Optimize Costs

Working on legacy databases might add an overhead cost to the company. For example, adding other applications or deploying IT infrastructure set up to work in a swift manner. Data migration from an old system to a new IT infrastructure can help streamline the operations by introducing more flexibility to scale and upgrade with new features. Data migration services help companies to move their data assets to a platform that will serve their business purpose efficiently. The transformation will help in saving on infrastructure as well as the workforce who get engaged in providing support.

For example, ASTM, a 100+ year old standards organization, has maintained its own servers and network for a community of 30,000+ scientists, researchers, engineers & academicians. Over time, they realized the need to pivot their business model from a publishing organization to a SaaS based technology provider through modernization of their legacy suite of applications. We redesigned the databases using hybrid data models on micro-services based architecture. Icreon team has helped to migrate 1800+ legacy MySQL tables and 100+ TB non-relational data into Postgres, MSSQL, Document DB, MongoDB, and S3 buckets. The new data model brings a lot of flexibility into the business and provides greater insights across departments.

Modernized Software

Data migration is very crucial to keep your business up and running with modern development and data needs. With ever-increasing big data, it has become important to adopt advanced yet efficient storage techniques to support business expansion and growth. For instance, a company might look forward to modernization by transitioning from a conventional SQL database to a data lake or any other flexible centralized data repository. A data lake is a centralized data repository that stores structured and unstructured form of data and allows users to run any big data workload to make better decisions.

For instance, Icreon has helped a freight service provider in legacy modernization process. The team at Icreon moved a conventional application and setups dependent on various third-party platforms to modernized application using technologies like AWS Redshift and Azure Data Warehouse services. This process re-invention has fast-tracked its operations and unlocked new revenue streams for the business.

Reduced Data Redundancy – Centralized Sharing

Data redundancy is one of the bottlenecks for organizations. This is the major reason why companies move all the data to a single place to minimize redundant data. In addition, data stored at a centralized location can be easily accessible across different divisions of a company. For instance, a case like a merger or acquisition needs a centralized repository to access data. Another typical example when different systems are siloed within the organization. This happens when different departments with a set of different databases reside in the system, irrespective of any sync between them. So, migration to cloud service is important to gain insights from data when you have different incompatible databases.

Did you know?

A Forrester study said that nearly 60% of organizations now rely on cloud services to compete in the digital world.

Improved Data Security

Data is a very critical asset for any company, be it in the form of daily operations and customers. Data is stored in databases that are used to perform various functions like automation, analytics, and visualization, to name a few. These databases are more prone to trespassers who get into through networks and use data for some unauthorized attempts.

Research conducted by IBM and the Ponemon Institute revealed the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million.

A data breach can affect an organization’s overall performance, right from lost business opportunities to competitive disadvantage. And this happens when companies deprioritize upgrade or modernization projects. With data migration services, organizations are backed by utmost security measures to protect mission-critical databases with constant updates and fixes.

In Icreon’s partnership with ASTM, we have done validations in various production environments without compromising customers’ or users’ personal information. The team applied data masking using FieldShield and DataProf techniques to ensure the data quality remains intact during migration. This modernization has helped the organization to achieve business results faster.

Data Migration and Innovation Enable Success

The switch from outgrown technologies or infrastructure to cloud data analytics is about capitalizing on data. This simply means getting more value from data by making timely business decisions.

Organizations in the big data world can become more responsive and informed when bringing innovation as a practice in their transformation journey.

Here’s how companies can start to build an innovation practice to harness maximum benefits of data migration:

Adopt technological innovations in AI to upend traditional data architecture workloads. New deep learning techniques mapping will help organizations to solve their complex business problems.

Go cloud to use serverless data platforms to make use of new models instantly. Cloud automated tools enable organizations to get faster time to market and greater agility.

Many companies are making use of APIs to collect data from different systems to their data lakes and plugin insights into their front-end web applications.

To bring innovation in customer experience and product quality, companies should reimagine their data migration approach. They should leverage cutting-edge cloud and data migration offerings to enable success for today and tomorrow.

Accelerate Digital Transformation with Data Migration

So, if companies move faster to migrate their data architecture and use analytics, they increase their chances of success. These technologies and well-planned migration processes will help organizations to attain significant improvements in terms of productivity and efficiency to improved ability to scale resources.

Icreon has worked on various data migration projects – redesigning database structure, creating standardized database and metadata management – to reducing data redundancy, improving operational efficiency and speeding up application development.

Plan your next move with Icreon. We will provide you with the right set of tools and the right team members to set you up for data migration success.