With every passing year, the popularity of Cloud technologies increasing continuously. It grasps the attention of many people and moving to the cloud has become acquisitive for modern enterprises and startups. 

The future of the DBMS market is cloud, according to Gartner. Gartner report says by 2022, 75% of all databases will be migrated or deployed to a cloud platform. This trend will expand to that extent due to databases used for analytics, and the SaaS model.

Are you also among those who are thinking about moving their databases to the cloud or making the transition to the database as a service (DBaaS)? Then you are at the right place. Through this blog, we will be sharing our tips and learnings to guide others embarking on a migration journey of a database to the Cloud.

Tips for migrating database to the cloud

Always remember that the better you prepare for migrating the database to the cloud, the better the chance that you’ll perform it smoothly and predictably.  

But in actuality, migrating all your database to a new environment can be daunting. In fact, if the migration process is not done properly, it can often leave crucial data vulnerable.

So, here we have provided a few tips to ensure that your database migration process goes smoothly:

1. Check your current data environment

Before moving toward the migration process, you need to understand and work on all the challenges and obstacles that come in front of you and how can you face them. Don’t forget to check the size of the database to understand how much storage you’ll need after migration. 

You need to check the applications to ensure they are cloud-compatible. You need to determine which databases and apps are crucial for this process. Also, determine which database needs to stay on-premises for compliance reasons or due to its non-feasibility to move them to the cloud.

2. Evaluate the skills & expertise of your internal team

Judging the worth of your internal team is also an important key factor for the successful migration to the cloud. You need to check out whether your internal team needs any upskilling or if their current workload is easy to handle or not. The reason is somehow upskilling is required in the migration process. So that your team can easily handle the process of the new cloud platform after migration or in case of using a different database in the cloud, your team also needs to upskill in that area as well. 

The reason behind assessing your team’s current workloads is to ensure that they do not get overscheduled during the migration process, which could result in delays or derailing projects.

3. Cleanse your data

Enhancing the quality and utility of the data of the enterprise, database migration proves to be a great opportunity. It ensures that you don’t transfer records that are duplicative, old, incomplete, or corrupted. 

Cleansing of data is an extremely involved, error-prone process, but since it’s unlikely the data will be cleansed again for some time after the migration, it’s important to ensure that you’re moving accurate data.

4. Select the right migration tools

There are plenty of tools are used for database migration to help new customers. For example, Google Cloud Platform recommends Alooma. This ETL tool simplifies database migration by automating one of the most complicated tasks in the process i.e. transforming and normalizing data. 

This tool eliminates all personally identifiable information i.e. PII and easily detects errors while moving data to the target database. Thus, ensure to determine which team skills are perfect for your requirement when evaluating and testing migration tools.

5. Leverage the best of Cloud

If you are seeking high performance and resilience, you should think about changing your architecture. Change in architecture means implementing caching strategies, implementing read-replicas, or moving to NoSQL options. 

6. Deploy a proof of concept

when checking the environment of your data, the challenges and risks you come across are deploying a proof of concept that brings unexpected issues to the surface and ensure you that your migration will be successful. 

To explore the flexibility and scalability of the cloud, use an actual application instead of creating a test app that would be a perfect fit for the best results. 

7. Repair, Validate and Migrate your data

The data loading could take several days to accomplish the migration as it depends on the database size.  During this process, the data will be normalized, transformed, and checked for errors. Once the data loading finishes, it must be checked again to ensure completeness, validity, and accuracy. To ensure that there is no issue addressed before migrating the actual database.

8. Re-evaluate your data before migration

Make sure that your organization performs a review of the entire database prior to migration and reclassifies it if necessary. As it maintains the integrity of existing security and compliance controls, as well as holds & retains any legal requirements, or keeps certain records on-prem. 

This process of re-evaluation and reclassification will involve multiple business units, including compliance and legal teams. Once you completed it, you’ll need to update your IT governance policies to reflect any changes.

9. Database schema recreation

Before the commencement of the data migration, you will need to transform your current data schema to one that works with your new database. It includes creating tables and writing scripts for functions such as database triggers and stored procedures.

10. Migrate your access privileges & security settings

During the migration process, cloud breaches are caused by misconfigurations, and cybersecurity is also affected too often. While your cloud service provider is responsible for cloud security, now it’s your responsibility to check everything that is put in the cloud, including enterprise databases and their contents. 

Cloud migration depends on the size and data of your organization, the entire process can take anywhere from several months to a year. But the crucial part is to get your databases moved efficiently, securely, and accurately while minimizing disruption to your business and your clients.

Conclusion

In short, while the data migration process to the cloud seems complicated, following the right tips at each stage will streamline your transfer and ensure that you can work efficiently in your new environment when done. 

Migration of databases gives your business the gateway to new opportunities offered by cloud computing, but each migration process should be customized to your individual needs. 

For a similar reason, each data migration process may present its own unique set of challenges. We hope that the tips outlined here can help you to navigate those challenges if they arise, avoiding critical delays and protecting the database in the process. 

If a cloud migration is suitable for your business strategy then it’s a time to take assistance from an expert. Go4hosting offers a free consultation as well as full support of your migration process.