Carrying out data migration is rarely simple, and more often than not a project of this nature ends up requiring far more resources than previously anticipated. However, even when things go better than expected – that is, a data migration project comes in under budget and on time – there is still great risk involved.
The risk? Data loss.
Unstructured data is usually the primary culprit of a difficult data migration process. Many organizations have data going back decades, which has stayed with them through several previous transformations, migrating from one to another internal legacy app system.
It is also typical for companies to have semi-structured data, such as when they have been working with Excel files and Access databases. That may not have presented a problem in the past, when only a limited number of people needed to access that data. But the truth of the matter is, semi-structured data doesn’t scale well at all.
Data that isn’t able to easily scale often leaves the sort of problem that snowballs. Unstructured content, metadata loss, and a host of other issues with data and documents get carried down as technical debt, making each subsequent migration project a nightmare of even larger degree.