Migrating Your Systems - Are You Prepared?

Lately, I've been leading a number of data migration efforts centered around SharePoint 2007/2010 for a few companies with very sensitive data. These companies decided not to upgrade to new versions of software, but decided to change hosting providers. In so doing, they believed that their system migraiton would be a simple process. Not so fast - it's always more complicated than it appears on the surface.


Here's a list of questions to ask yourself when preparing for a system migration: 

• Are we bringing over all of our data, or just a subset?
• What kind of downtime can we accept? 
• Disaster recovery? 
• Which systems get moved first?  Next? 
• Who has access to the old systems? Are those people still around? Will they be part of the migration effort? Do they want to help us? 
• Who will have access to the new systems?
• How are we planning on moving the data? 
• Do we understand our systems and know which systems access which data? 
• Do we know what exact versions of software our current systems are running on? 
• Will our new hosting provider be able to match the versions or do we need to upgrade? 
• How do we ensure the integrity of the data? 
• How much data do we have - how many databases, How many Gigs? How many records? 
• How is the data physically going to be moved? 
• How can we protect the data?  Do we need to audit the entire process?
• Have we inventoried everything at our current provider? 
• Who will be managing the new systems? 
• How much time do we have for the move? 
• What kind of testing will be done to ensure the new systems are working properly? 
• Do we need to hire consultants to help with the move (hint: yes!)

If I could offer just one bit of advice to anyone planning a migration effort, it would be - do not underestimate the amount of effort required.   Hiring an expert who has experience leading migration efforts is well worth the investment.  The cost of hiring a consultant is more than offset by the cost of not having an expert on hand and ending up with major unforeseen problems.  


What do you think? 


Have you recently been part of a system migration? Was it successful?