Tim Bernes-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, once said, "data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems". This couldn't be truer in today's modern business environment. Businesses accumulate a mass of data to be able to offer more and more customer centric services in order to remain competitive. At the same time systems continuously become increasingly sophisticated requiring constant upgrades, says JMR Software.
Data migration, although not often talked about is in fact a common task in the IT environment, whether the company is going through a system upgrade, installing data warehouses, extending the life of a legacy system or merging with another company. At face value the data migration process seems to be one of the easiest things to do - you move data from the source system to the target system and thus becomes a last-minute decision.
A Gartner report on the subject states that 83% of all data migration projects either fail outright or suffer significant cost overruns and/or delays. This is a very high percentage yet organisations spend millions of rand and man-hours on new systems with little thought being given to the importance of the data migration process as part of the overall project.
Two of the most common mistakes organisations make is not including the data migration process in the overall project and not engaging with business from the start of the project. Often the data migration process is left to the last minute and treated as a low-level technical task.
Organisations that tend to perform this task on their own are faced with a whole range of obstacles, some of which include:
* Purchasing off the shelf data migration software that is only used once;
* Dedicated resources that are involved full time throughout the process;
* Resources are required to learn the software in order to perform the actual migration;
* Software packages are mainly from International sellers where technical support is often difficult to acquire when its needed most.
Over and above the technical obstacles faced by the company the legal and compliance issues surrounding the security data are often overlooked.
BitSHIFT is a data migration solution developed by JMR Software that has a unique approach to the migration process. JMR Software understands the importance of the data migration process and have over the years developed its very own set of tools that follow a strict methodology, both of which have been tried and tested with its clients.
Its focus is on running data migration projects on time and to budget without compromising data security ensuring the process is 100% legally compliant, for this reason it offer a data migration solution and not a generic off the shelf product, says Mike Richards, CEO of JMR Software.
Contact the experts to discuss your data migration requirements.
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