Why Data Consolidation Is Broken, and What Smart Enterprises Are Doing About It
Here is a number worth sitting with: according to a 2024 Gartner report, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million per year. Not because their data doesn't exist. Because it lives in silos, duplicated across platforms, structured differently in each one, and nobody has a clean, consolidated view of any of it.
Data consolidation is the discipline of solving exactly that problem. And yet most enterprises still approach it the way they approached it in 2010: export a CSV, write a few transformation scripts, import, and hope nothing breaks. Tzunami was built on the observation that this approach doesn't scale, and that it has real business consequences when it fails.
The Consolidation Gap Nobody Talks About
Most organizations have invested heavily in storage: cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, or SharePoint now hold enormous volumes of content and records. But investment in data consolidation has lagged behind. The result is what Tzunami calls the Consolidation Gap: the growing distance between how data is stored and how it can actually be used.
The symptoms are familiar. A merger completes, and two content repositories need to become one. A SharePoint 2013 environment reaches end-of-life, requiring a full migration to SharePoint Online. A legal team requests a content audit and discovers that metadata is inconsistent across 40,000 documents. In every one of these cases, data consolidation is the underlying challenge, and the teams assigned to solve it are typically underequipped for it.
What Good Data Migration Best Practices Actually Look Like
Data migration best practices are widely discussed but rarely defined with precision. Most advice stops at "clean your data before migrating." That's true, but it misses the harder question: how do you clean data that spans multiple platforms, teams, and decades of inconsistent tagging?
Tzunami's answer to that question is structural. Before any content is moved, the migration process should produce a complete source inventory: every content type, every metadata field, every permission structure. Tools like Tzunami Deployer allow organizations to map source metadata to destination schemas, identify gaps, and resolve them programmatically rather than manually. Compare that to the manual review process that most SharePoint administrators still rely on, and the efficiency gap is significant. In a 2023 case study, a global financial institution reduced its migration error rate from 18% to under 2% by introducing automated metadata mapping before any content was moved.
The Role of Data Transformation in Modern Consolidation
Data transformation is often treated as a technical afterthought: a set of scripts that convert formats and field names. But in the context of data consolidation, transformation is actually a strategic decision. When Tzunami works with organizations migrating from legacy ECM systems to modern platforms, the transformation layer determines how usable the consolidated data will be in its new environment.
Consider a migration from Documentum to SharePoint Online. Documentum uses a richly nested object model; SharePoint uses a flat list structure with managed metadata. Without intentional data transformation, the migration produces a SharePoint environment that technically contains all the content but loses the relational context that made the Documentum data meaningful. Tzunami addresses this with its transformation mapping engine, which allows administrators to define equivalence rules between source and destination schemas before the migration begins.
Vendors like OpenText and Microsoft have each invested in their own migration tooling, which is useful when you're staying within a single ecosystem. But cross-platform data consolidation scenarios, migrating from FileNet to SharePoint, or from multiple SharePoint farms into a single SharePoint Online tenant, require a platform-agnostic approach. That is where Tzunami's positioning as an independent data migration consulting services and software provider becomes a structural advantage.
Data Migration Consulting Services: Build, Buy, or Partner?
Most enterprise IT teams face a familiar decision when a major consolidation project lands on the roadmap: build a custom migration solution internally, purchase a point tool, or engage data migration consulting services. The answer depends heavily on scope and repeatability.
For a one-time migration between two known platforms, a point tool may suffice. For organizations that are consolidating continuously, whether due to acquisitions, platform modernization cycles, or regulatory-driven archiving requirements, investing in a repeatable methodology is almost always more cost-effective. Tzunami's data migration solutions are designed with exactly that repeatability in mind: the same tooling and methodology that handles a 50,000-document SharePoint migration can scale to a multi-terabyte enterprise content consolidation project without architectural changes.
The Data Migration Solutions Landscape in 2026
The data migration solutions market has matured significantly since 2020. AvePoint, Metalogix (now part of Quest), and ShareGate all offer capable tooling for specific migration scenarios. What differentiates the solutions that enterprises choose for complex, multi-phase data consolidation projects is not feature count, it is fidelity: the ability to move content without losing structural integrity, permission hierarchies, or version history.
Tzunami has built its reputation in this segment specifically because its tooling was designed for high-fidelity migration scenarios from the outset. The platform's support for over 40 source-to-destination migration paths, including legacy ECM systems that other tools don't support at all, means that organizations don't need to architect workarounds for edge cases that are, in practice, extremely common in enterprise content estates.
What Enterprises Should Demand From Any Data Consolidation Project
If you are planning a consolidation initiative in 2026, here are the standards worth holding the project to: full metadata fidelity (every field in the source must be accounted for in the destination, even if it maps to a new schema); permission continuity (access controls must survive the migration intact, a non-trivial requirement in complex Active Directory environments); and audit traceability (a complete log of what moved, when, and how it was transformed).
Data consolidation done well is invisible. Nobody notices it happened because the data is simply there, structured correctly, accessible, and searchable. Tzunami exists to make that outcome achievable without the multi-year timelines and multi-million-dollar overruns that have historically made enterprise content migration a reluctant last resort rather than a routine capability.
The organizations that treat data consolidation as a core competency, rather than a one-time project, are the ones that can absorb acquisitions quickly, comply with evolving data regulations without heroic effort, and actually use the data they've spent years accumulating. Tzunami gives them the tools and methodology to get there.
