Data Migration Testing: Strategy & Best Practices
As the world is witnessing a huge transformation at the technological front, organizations are constantly upgrading their legacy systems to keep up with the trend. Though updating to new systems is the need of time, a major challenge lies in migrating data without losing it. Hence, it becomes important to plan out an efficient data migration strategy to ensure that migration happens without any data loss.
Testing of migration is as important as migrating data; failing to do so, organizations may face issues of discrepancies causing expected results, which can affect the organization adversely. Furthermore, to carry out efficient migration testing a well-defined strategy is required, without which the organization can be left financially drained of resources after setting up more processes than they need. They may even find that their commercial success is negatively influenced by not exploiting their data to the fullest.
What is Data Migration? Why Do Organizations Undertake Data Migration?
The process of moving data from one system to another, preferably from a legacy system to a new one, is known as data migration. However, the process is not as straightforward as it may seem because it involves a change in storage and database or application. The data migration process involves three defined steps extracting data, transforming data, and loading data. When the data is extracted from the sources, it must go through a series of cleansing to eliminate errors and inaccuracies to qualify the data for efficient analysis and load them to the targeted destinations.
Organizations perform data migration for varied reasons; first, as a part of their system revamping plan, the other possible reason could be during the upgrade in databases, while another possibility could be when creating a new data warehouse or merging data from acquisitions. But it’s most common when teams are deploying other systems alongside their existing applications for integration purposes.
Why is Data Migration Strategy Important?
A comprehensive data migration strategy comes in handy when performing large-scale operations that need to preserve business continuity simultaneously. Organizations perform data migration to improve performance and competitiveness. When organizations carefully control the data migration process and automation testing, they can prevent delays caused by missing deadlines or exceeding budgets, while improperly managing the process can leave a lot of migration projects dead in their tracks. In planning and strategizing the work, teams must ensure that they put their best foot forward with undivided focus on one project.
