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Why Data Migration is Important to Transform Your Business

Why data migration 1200

Our data is scattered. Locked in different systems, separated in silos, data is all over the place, and it’s accumulating at a staggering rate. But data can be so much more valuable when we can get it all in the same place. When we have all of our data together, we can gain a 360-degree view of our organizations. We can then use information about our customers, products, and services to make faster, better, more informed business decisions.

 

Data migration is now an essential component of data management and is the key to gaining this 360-degree view. By implementing data migration practices in your organization, you can gain a consolidated view of your organization and unlock the full value of your data.

 

Why is Data Migration Important?

 

Data migration is important for several reasons.

 

Agility We have to be able to transfer data among different platforms and applications, so that as our technology needs change, and we upgrade to the best possible platform or application for the organization, we can take our data along with us. With data migration, your business agile and avoids getting locked into specific vendors and platforms.

 

Reduced costs Older technologies can cost a lot to maintain. Moving data to the cloud, for example, can help you save money on both hardware and labor. But you need to be able to get your data there. Using an ETL tool can help move your data to a cloud data warehouse, which can help cut data storage costs.

 

Greater collaboration Breaking down your data silos makes it possible for departments to work better together, and to gain visibility into what’s happening across the business.

 

5 Data Migration Considerations

 

When you’re thinking about making a data migration plan, there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Consider the timing

Data migrations can be done at any time, but are particularly helpful in certain situations, such as after a merger or acquisition. In this case, the data migration will also serve as a data integration project, as you incorporate the data from multiple organizations. Data migration projects can also be useful after a storage migration, application migration or cloud data migration. Basically, any time that you introduce a new platform or application into the organization, you’re probably going to need to migrate data.

 

2. Take a data inventory

It’s impossible to migrate your data safely and completely if you don’t know where all data is located and what format it’s in. Take a complete inventory of all the data in each of your systems. Consider data locations, types of data you’re dealing with, and the format of your data, in both the source systems and in the target database. It’s also important to understand how all of your data impacts existing business processes.

 

3. Look at your data governance practices

A data migration project is an opportunity to examine and improve your data governance practices. Identify issues with source data and resolve them as you migrate your data. Look at the people, processes and technology involved with your data.

 

4. Examine your disaster recovery processes

 Losing data is a huge setback and hassle for any organization. Before you begin a data migration project and start moving your data around, make sure you have complete and recent backups. You also want to have a validation plan in place so you can confirm that the data transfer process was successful.

 

5. Identify and engage all of your stakeholders

Almost everyone in your organization uses data. Make sure to engage the leaders of all departments that could be impacted by your data migration plan. Working with all of the potential stakeholders will help you avoid issues of data ownership that might arise.

 

How Can Data Migration Transform Your Business?

 

Data migration to the cloud can definitely help transform your data team and processes, but it can also transform your business.  How?

 

It provides a single source of the truth

Without a single source of truth, data is siloed and departments are operating based on limited information. Migrating data to a centralized cloud data warehouse enables analysts and managers to make data-driven decisions based on the data from the business as a whole, rather than from a single system or a departmental data silo.

 

It improves data quality

Data can get messy. The data migration process gives us an opportunity to clean, transform and deduplicate data as it is moved, resulting in higher quality data. Using ETL software for your data migration allows you to use the transformation stage to ensure that the data loaded into the target destination is accurate, reliable, and in a consistent format.

When data from all of our source systems is consolidated in a single place, we can create one view of our customers and our businesses. Production data, customer and service data, and sales and marketing information is all valuable when it comes to making business decisions. Businesses need access to all of this data to make the decisions that will help them stay competitive in today’s data-driven market.

 

It speeds time to insight

Having to manually collect data from multiple source systems is time-consuming. Data migration allows us to get all of our data into a single storage system like a cloud data warehouse, data lake, or lakehouse. If analysts and other employees can access all of the data they need from a single system, they can start using it right away to make better decisions, resulting in faster time to insight.

 

Want to Learn More About Data Migration?

 

Given the increasing volume and complexity of data, and the speed and scale needed to handle it, the only place you can compete effectively—and cost-effectively—is in the cloud. Matillion provides a complete data integration and transformation solution that is purpose-built for the cloud and cloud data warehouses.

Matillion Data Loader is a free SaaS-based data integration tool that seamlessly loads valuable business data into your cloud data warehouse. With a code-free, wizard-based pipeline builder to common data sources like Salesforce, Google Analytics, and more, Matillion Data Loader can help make your first data migration (and every one after) quick and easy. It’s also free. Sign up today to try Matillion Data Loader and kickstart your data migration project.

 

Matillion ETL software is cloud-native, purpose-built to support leading cloud data warehouse environments, including Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure Synapse, and Delta Lake on Databricks.

Request a demo to learn more about how you can unlock the potential of your data with Matillion’s cloud-based approach to data transformation.