How to Migrate Your Small Business IT to a New System

Most IT system migration projects understandably run late or over-budget because of financial or operational constraints. However, this may put your IT system at risk and negatively impact business operations. Below explains how to strategic plan and successfully complete an IT system migration.

Data Migration

Bear in mind that obtaining security accreditation for data migration purposes always poses certain problems. Avoid underestimating the difficulties of obtaining data from internal systems because it will take vast amounts of time and money. This is especially true for outdated systems or unfamiliar applications. Systems migration is not a single executed task, but rather a continuous process that must be carefully planned to avoid disrupting or harming business operations. Be sure to properly perform risk management analyses when migrating data.

Third-Party Agreements

IT system migrations should only occur after you have obtained the necessary third-party provider and supplier agreements. Avoid focusing all attention on a single third-party supplier, even if they provide the majority of services. Instead, analyze how else your organization uses third parties because this will reduce unpleasant surprises and challenges down the road. Be sure to consider all third-parties that host any databases or applications and examine their service-level agreements. There will most likely be hidden costs and turnaround time involved in transitioning to a new system that may take months to clear up.

Timing

When it comes to ample amounts of various data segments, timing is important, but flexible. That is, customer and product data can be migrated ahead of other data segments as long as any new additions are manually tracked and updated. Next, migrate any open transitions, such as pending invoices, or current data segments, such as ongoing customer service issues, during the official migration. Any historical data, sales or inventory history, can be imported much later. This will reduce the workload and burden on the IT team.

Data Cleanup

Be sure to take responsibility for cleaning up bad or irrelevant data before turning it over to the third-party vendor. For example, when migrating customer addresses, the city and postal code are not always stored in consistent places in older accounting systems. In this case, an experienced office staff should export the data to a spreadsheet so they can clean it up and organize it for the vendor to easily import it into the new system. As an alternative, some companies prefer to use a third-party IT services or those of a company near them to perform the IT systems migration for them.

Finally, performing a test migration before the actual system migrations will ensure a successful solution implementation.

Author: Anica Oaks is a professional content and copywriter who graduated from the University of San Francisco. She loves dogs, the ocean, and anything outdoor-related. She was raised in a big family, so she’s used to putting things to a vote. Also, cartwheels are her specialty. You can connect with Anica here. Anica writes for Bedrock IT, which offers IT services in Ottawa.