Increasing data volumes, types and sources are making data migration riskier than ever, but Oliver Silva of legal eDiscovery provider Casepoint says with a tight grip on the planning and budget management process, companies can successfully move data from one place to another.
Data migration is like moving in the real world: Getting from Point A to Point B is expensive, time-consuming and challenging. It demands extensive planning, budgeting and organization. It requires a detailed inspection of the new house, a thorough cleaning out of the old one and safe transport between the two.
Because of these risks and expenses, people need a really good reason to uproot their lives; they need the right opportunity at the right time to make the move. The same is true for business data migration.
High-stakes migration
Data migration happens when there is a business opportunity — whether it be tech stack consolidation, access to new innovations or better data security. These opportunities can be transformational for companies, and the investment can help them gain a significant competitive advantage in the market. Like renters or homeowners, migrations also occur when the company is pushed out, namely by a legacy system that is being sunsetted or by a price increase.
Today, businesses are collecting heavy volumes of data, which means that data migration has become even more time-consuming and costly. Not to mention the fact that data types and the diversity of data sets are also expanding. Now, it’s not just about volume, it’s also about complexity.
Add to that complexity the shifting landscape of cloud data sources. While cloud computing resources have simplified data storage in many ways, the services they provide, the features they enhance within their products and the available APIs are all rapidly changing, further complicating migration.
Thorough planning paired with rigorous budget management — among other risk management strategies — can help companies successfully make the move and seize the opportunity.
1. Obsess over budget planning and management
When a move becomes official, companies are contractually obligated to get off the legacy system by a certain time, just like the end of a rental lease, and are incentivized to meet that timeline in order to avoid duplicate costs.
To tackle this time constraint, organizations must assess the complexity of the migration up front. This requires a comprehensive due diligence process around all data aspects and sources. A detailed audit helps organizations identify what kinds of data they have, how much of it they have to move, and where it lives.
From there, project leaders can fine-tune the timeline and budget through testing. After an audit, companies will be able to identify their most complicated and most basic data sets, each of which can be migrated in a test environment.
The results of those tests empower project leaders to make more educated predictions about how long the entire process will take. Ranking data transfers by level of effort will also make clear the resources necessary in order to complete those tasks. Budget planners can pull data-driven insights from historic migrations if available (how long did this take before?) to further inform their estimates.
Each stage of data migration should be considered when budget planning — from data transmission to validation. This outline should be granular, even taking into consideration seemingly minute inputs like sign-off from project leaders on data quality at different checkpoints.
During the planning period, it’s also critical to check in with customers. Even if the company has identified the right time for the move, the timing might not be right for their stakeholders. In order to preserve key partnerships during a migration and prevent unforeseen delays in the project timeline, business leaders need to have honest conversations with customers about down times.
A migration budget is like any budget — an approximation. When the project goes live, there will inevitably be unforeseen costs and setbacks. In order to limit budget exposure, project leaders must take a proactive, vigilant approach, ensuring they’re right-sizing the resources required at all times to drive project goals. By obsessing over the budget and managing against it, project leaders will also keep the timeline on track (since the two are inextricably linked).
2. Build the right team
When it comes to personnel, large migrations are a 360-degree process. It’s all hands-on deck from leadership down to the analysts who actually perform the migration. Everyone at the company should understand the timeline, the budget and the goals — and everyone should be working against them.
All successful data migration programs have the following key players:
- Executive sponsor: An executive from the C-suite or leadership who can advocate for the project and tie it to business value. They keep an eye on the big picture and prevent scope creep as the project unfolds.
- Project manager: A project leader that manages the day-to-day tasks that drive larger project goals. They set standards for communication and ensure workflows are keeping everything on target. They also crosscheck all activity against regulatory requirements to maintain compliance.
- Technological SME: A subject matter expert that deeply understands the technological challenges of the migration. This person knows both the target system and the legacy system and can accurately assess the complexity of the data for budgeting purposes. They lead vendor selection to ensure company goals, user needs and data security requirements are met. They are available for triage when inevitable issues arise.
- Migration analyst: A technical team member that actually runs the data migration program and handles data safely within the time constraints. They’re also responsible for identifying any issues that happen live and escalating them to SMEs and project managers.
- Change management personnel: A user-focused team member that drives adoption of the new system to ensure minimal down time and maximum productivity. They’re likely tied into internal communications in order to execute the post-migration management plan.
With the right team, businesses can drive a truly seamless migration. In other words, the right team is key to reducing risk when it comes to managing budgets and timelines.
3. Handle data safely for quality and compliance
The right personnel will also ensure that data remains safe and secure during transport, another key consideration for low-risk migration.
Data in transit can present opportunities for cyber criminals to wage an attack. Beyond bad actors, data in transit is also susceptible to data loss due to human, technological or connectivity errors.
To minimize security threats and data loss, companies must leverage the right encryption methods for safe transport. Most critically, project stakeholders should establish validation methods post-export and pre-ingestion to confirm data quality. These quality control methods often include data profiling, data mapping or data transformation with clear validation points that signal when something is off.
Securing data during transport is not just necessary from a business perspective but also from a compliance perspective, especially for organizations in heavily regulated industries that handle sensitive information like financial services, government or healthcare — and especially now that fines related to data breaches are reaching billion-dollar price tags.
Regulators in those industries may require evidence that appropriate or reasonable controls are in place over sensitive data during a migration. Project managers should crosscheck all activity against regulatory standards to avoid hefty fines.
4. Leverage communication best practices to drive success
To keep data migration tasks on the set timeline, especially data security and compliance tasks, project managers must set and enforce communication best-practices including:
- Project kickoff and post-mortem: The project should start with a kickoff meeting to align on shared goals, timelines and budget. It should end with a post-mortem in which team members discuss what went right, what went wrong and key learnings for the next migration.
- Mid-project retrospectives: Throughout the project, project managers should conduct smaller, isolated post-mortems so that the team is learning and getting better as they go.
- Regular meeting cadence: Project managers should determine a meeting cadence that feels comfortable for all stakeholders. Going into those meetings, stakeholders should have clear responsibilities around participation expectations and agenda.
- Clear communication channels: At the start of the project, project managers must set standards for documentation and communication channels so everyone knows where to find the information they need to be successful.
Company leaders should also be checking in with customers both at the start and throughout the entire process to keep a pulse on those relationships and to ensure their needs are still being met throughout the transition.
Additionally, it’s important for the company to celebrate key milestones throughout the timeline to keep motivation high and so that stakeholders know they’re getting value from the project. That motivation will become crucially important as the project moves from migration into adoption.
5. Drive adoption throughout the entire process
While adoption happens after migration, it’s still tied up in the migration process — especially in the initial planning and budgeting phase.
To drive adoption, companies need buy-in. During the planning and budgeting phase, the executive sponsor will earn that buy-in from the top down — from executives to the end-user. During vendor selection, project leaders will get input from the end user (since successful tool selection simply cannot happen without their needs factored in) further solidifying that buy-in.
This work happens early on in the migration, before the company commits to the investment, but must continue throughout the entire project via project updates and celebrating wins. That way, once the migration is complete it will still be crystal clear to stakeholders and users why they should use the tool. Remaining on time is also key to successful adoption. When a migration takes too long, stakeholders often lose motivation or forget why the move matters in the first place.
After the migration, companies should instate a true change management procedure to train users, support stakeholders and set expectations to reduce the time to productivity.
Oliver Silva is vice president of product operations at Casepoint, a legal eDiscovery provider. He brings over two decades of legal industry experience to his role at Casepoint. He connects product development with customer needs and market trends, focusing on the impact of solutions in terms of value creation, achievement of customer outcomes and enhancement of the overall customer experience. 
