Before delving into the steps for completing a successful migration, you should confirm whether a migration is necessary for your company. Typically, data migrations take place after a company experiences significant growth and customer spikes. This uptick in demand puts a strain on existing resources and supplies, meaning your company may need to expand its hosting capabilities via data migration to a larger server.<\/p>\n It is important that you recognize these progressions in your company\u2019s development cycle to stay ahead of the curve and avoid growing pains. If not, your customers may experience bandwidth issues or downtime when your existing architecture capabilities do not scale linearly with your business growth.<\/p>\n How to pick a hosting provider?<\/strong><\/p>\n When selecting a hosting provider, it is crucial that you have an open line of communication. Ideally, you should be assigned a dedicated point of contact or small team that will work with you throughout the entire migration process. You want to avoid getting passed around from person to person each step of the way, because having too many cooks in the kitchen adds unneeded complexity to an already complicated process.<\/p>\n When evaluating hosting providers, you should clarify the hosting company\u2019s responsibilities versus what they expect you to do. Without this clear understanding, you may assume something will be handled by the hosting provider, when in fact it was something that you were supposed to complete. You should also focus your initial discussions on how much effort they will put into dissecting the individual pieces of your company\u2019s applications and confirm exactly how they intend to move them over individually. Also, don\u2019t be shy; ask for references of past migrations with similar technology stacks to get an idea of what the process was like, how long it took and so on.<\/p>\n How to complete a successful data migration?<\/strong><\/p>\n Now that you have confirmed that you need to move to a larger server and you have selected your hosting provider, you should follow the below steps to ensure a successful data migration without getting a \u201cmigration migraine.\u201d<\/p>\n Step 1: Architect your custom solution<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The foundation of a rock-solid hosting architecture is to custom design each solution on the basis of specific client needs. Similar to building architects, who spend hours scouring site plans and determining how to best construct a sound infrastructure, hosting-solution architects should spend significant time in the preplanning stage. By getting to know the ins and outs of a system architecture, the hosting-solution architect can create a custom solution that checks all of your boxes.<\/p>\n Step 2: Build, provision and pretest<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Once your hosting provider has designed the new custom architecture on the basis of the needs you clearly outlined in Step 1, you should test it several times to ensure all the necessary libraries, packages and supporting software are properly installed. This \u201cburn-in\u201d step evaluates the new architecture\u2019s performance, redundancy, failover, library and application installation, monitoring, alerting, and operating-system requirements.<\/p>\n Step 3: Move your data to the new system<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Once the new architecture has been tested and approved, it is important to work with your hosting provider to identify any data that must be synchronized, as well as ensure all necessary updates are copied and captured. Since data is critical to your business, your team should be responsible for completing the actual migration of the data and database to the new architecture. That way, you ensure it is completed the way you need it to be done and know that the correct data has been identified, captured and moved.<\/p>\n Step 4: Synchronize your database<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n After the data has been moved to the new system, you should verify that the database information is configured and secured. All structured data stored in your previous hosting environment should be automatically and immediately replicated in the new hosting environment so your customers experience no downtime during the cutover process.<\/p>\n Step 5: Move your DNS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Your hosting provider should redirect your public site\u2019s DNS records to point to high-availability load balancers, which will immediately redirect the connection back to your previous infrastructure. This redirection should be completely transparent to both customers and applications so there is no latency or interference with your customer traffic during this process. Allowing one week for the new DNS information to spread ensures that DNS propagation latency will not affect your customer\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n Step 6: Implement your code<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Now you will need to implement your custom code on your new hosting platform. In this step, the customer also works with the hosting provider to ensure all necessary libraries, packages and supporting software are installed.<\/p>\n Step 7: Test your code with live data<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n This next step is an important one. You will need to test your real code, with real data, to ensure accuracy and completeness of the application. At this stage, the database has live information and the local data volumes have received both the replication and incremental updates for existing data with the live site. Given your intimate knowledge of your applications, functions and features, the hosting provider will generally rely on you to test the completeness of the data synchronization and database replication.<\/p>\n Step 8: Flip the switch<\/span> <\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, because the database and data volumes have been continuously migrating updates, all data is in real time and ready to support customers. You should have a predetermined maintenance window for the hosting provider to \u201cflip the switch\u201d for the customer traffic to direct it from the old data server to the new, tested-and-ready hosting environment.<\/p>\n Even if you closely follow each of the steps outlined above, you may need to factor in additional steps to meet all of your specific needs in a full data migration. As previously mentioned, it is vital that you maintain a close working relationship and provide detailed plans to your hosting provider to avoid a migration migraine.<\/p>\n Source: www.datacenterjournal.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whether why are migrations such a headache for IT departments? When they are not thoroughly planned and carefully executed, a migration can result in potential downtime and revenue loss. Knowing this fact, are the risks worth the reward? According to … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/felhoszolgaltatas-blog.hu\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/shutterstock_94364473.jpg\")
Does it need to migrate the data?<\/strong><\/p>\n