What is a data migration?
Data migration
Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommissioning of legacy data storage are considered part of the entire data migration process.[1][2] Data migration is a key consideration for any system implementation, upgrade, or consolidation, and it is typically performed in such a way as to be as automated as possible, freeing up human resources from tedious tasks. Data migration occurs for a variety of reasons, including server or storage equipment replacements, maintenance or upgrades, application migration, website consolidation, disaster recovery, and data center relocation.[2]
Content migration
Content migrations entail risks. Even though some of the reasons like cost might be obvious, there are some less obvious reasons to avoid a migration exercise. These include corruption in transit and loss of context, particularly the unstructured content, which is typically one of the larger artefacts of business. There is also the risk of external references not being considered (broken links to content). The size of the data to be migrated makes the very resource intensive (Source- Destination- Temporary- storage, network bandwidth etc.), which means that auditing the migration process could also be complex and require consistency and traceability.