Merging Companies? Acquiring Companies? What are you doing with all the data?
At some point in a company’s lifecycle, data migration is bound to happen. Mergers, acquisitions, technological innovation, transitioning to cloud, business process optimization, regulatory mandates, or sheer data volume growth are just a few of the reasons data migrations occur. One thing you can be sure of is that when the time comes, your company is faced with a critical IT project that needs to be executed with precision, expertise, and breadth of knowledge. You are faced with the question whether you are sure you know how to handle it right.
No matter what the cause for data migration, you need to have a migration strategy in place and the ability to answer these questions:
- Do you know what data will be migrated, the data that won’t, and how are you going to handle each?
- How are you going to ensure that once the data is moved, it will still be accessible, and its integrity will be uncompromised?
- Who will design the migration plan and carry out the actual migration?
- How will the stages of the migration plan be communicated internally, among employees, and externally, among your customers?
- Who is responsible for the security, integrity and compliance of the data undergoing migration?
- What technology will automate the migration?
- Who is your Migration Guru at mission control?
In a recent post on how to ensure on-time and on-budget delivery of critical IT projects, our VP of Services Pete Kinkead makes the case for engaging an external IT Program Manager. He argues that such a dedicated resource possesses the soft skills and technical expertise that companies often lack in-house for a successful execution, as well as the big-picture foresight that can eliminate a lot of potential headaches.
Working with a client on a recent migration project, I was reminded of Pete’s advice as it occurred to me that the same reasoning applies to data migrations. Most of the skills needed in a data migration whether it is a merger, an acquisition, or just data relocation, are transient and are usually missing from the IT team’s core competencies. At the same time, a successful data migration presupposes a lot of short and long-term planning, as well as the ability to anticipate multiple disaster scenarios, and the respective strategies to avert or overcome them.
This is where working with the iShift Migration team can really pay off. We have experience and expertise in migrating data to and from various platforms. Moreover, we know how to devise a successful strategy in merging organizations together, whether this means just migrating the data to the acquiring company or merging data sources between merging companies. Sometimes, a company may be undergoing a transformational change that doesn’t involve mergers and acquisitions, merely rearchitecting its IT infrastructure in the cloud.
Our experienced engineers utilize their migration skills every day, so they are always fresh and ready to go. There is no need to invest budget and time training your scarce internal IT resources on skills they will use one time. When we join forces with you to execute your data migration, you get the migration team AND you get the migration strategy:
- We will help you define the data to be migrated and decide what to do with the data that won’t.
- We will work with you to ensure that the data is not only moved from one location to another, but is also compatible, verifiable, and accessible within the new system.
- We will make sure that you can provide chain-of-custody reporting for the migrated data.
- We will outline the security plan for the migration.
- We will advise you in selecting the migration technology to automate the process and lead the team performing the data migration.
Depending on your business goals, our advisors will guide your merge process for a smooth and successful project.
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About Chuck
Charles Arconi is a Principal Architect at iShift who has 25+ years of IT experience architecting and deploying cloud-based email and communication technologies. For the last 10 years, Chuck’s primary focus has been migrations: data to the cloud, email to Office 365, archiving data to cloud, etc. He is an accomplished technologist who likes direct interactions with clients, speaking, explaining, and strategizing about technology with them.
He also is a think-out-of-the-box kind of guy who likes to challenge mainstream practices and design innovative methodologies for the sake of efficiency, effectiveness, and usefulness. Every month Chuck will offer his take on cloud industry news, cloud-native technologies, and practices, and share his original insights about best practices in cloud computing. You can follow Chuck on LinkedIn or contact him directly at [email protected].
About iShift
iShift is a multi-cloud technology solutions company that provides cloud engineering, cloud migration, cloud management and specialized IT staffing services. Our mission is to help businesses to simplify and accelerate growth while enabling digital transformation and IT modernization. No matter where organizations are in their cloud journey, iShift can design, build, optimize and manage a future-ready multi-cloud environment, resulting in significant cost savings, increased workforce productivity, operational resilience, continuity of services, and business agility. For more information on how our offerings empower businesses through their adoption of cloud and modern technology, visit www.ishift.net.
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