Your Request For Proposal (RFP) is out. You have responses, and you are now wading through all of the platforms that will take you from your old software into your new options. This is a big deal. It might be the biggest deal of your career as you move toward reducing your cost, technical debt, and modernizing the way you and your business work.
Time For Change
While all of the new features from every participating vendor are paraded to you, the simple fact is your data exists in one place which is not the place it will be after you pick your next-generation platform.
We’ve been there, for decades and across verticals and platforms, helping to define the options, differences, and solutions to what is ultimately the same consideration - moving the data out of your old solution, shutting it down so you can stop paying for it, and making it available to the new solutions you are looking for.
Wrapped in that simple construct are a series of terms, roles, responsibilities and definitions that ultimately mean the same thing, but may hold significant impacts on how you get there. Whether you are looking for a consultant to help, an internal resource, or simply navigating your vendor’s terminology, “migration”, “conversion”, and “archive” will come up and will have significant impacts on your business processes and budget.
Our industry does not do well to define this. If you were to look for a consultant to help you today, would you want a Database Architect (DBA), ETL engineer, data migration specialist, data analyst, software engineer, or data conversion consultant to assist you? While all of these things provide a solution, what they provide can be remarkably different.
We’re here to take a stab at this for you with a few decade s of experience across all of the major software verticals to help define for you what the difference between migration, conversion, archival, and ETL means for you and your big change to a new platform.
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)
Is standard terminology for moving and manipulating digital data. It is effectively a data integration that involves pushing data from one source to another, potentially on a regular cadence for integrations or warehousing, or through a large and complicated orchestration to move data entirely from one system to another in a conversion or migration process.
Data Migration
Aligned with ETL, a data migration process involves moving data from one system to another to effectively shift the business operations from the previous (legacy) system to the new day-forward business system. Data migrations are often hand-in-hand with new product and platform implementations where the business requires the data in the legacy solution to be a part of the active business processes in their new software.
Data Conversion
In many cases, especially when you are looking for a new hire or a consultant, data conversion and migration overlap. The key difference between the two is that a conversion requires a programmatic and fundamental change to the data. This may be due to the legacy system data being stored in a proprietary format. For all intents, data conversions sit on top of data migrations and often require specialization in the legacy solution, legacy vendor involvement, or a simplified solution to migrate the data.
Data Archival
Similar to data migrations and data conversions, data archival moves data from a previous system to a separate system. Fundamentally different from a migration, the archive data does not go into the day-forward solution. Instead, the data sits outside of the day-forward solution to avoid the complexities of a migration and offer an easy separation of data that may not be required for day-to-day business, but still must be held on hand for compliance, security, and other considerations.
Archival can be as simple with the Launch platform allowing users to both separate their data while effortlessly converting it for ad-hoc export, or integrating directly into your day-forward platform.
TL;DR
The definitions for data migration are loose and there is no winning or losing strategy by definition. Rather, each of the options here present a solid and functional end-to-end solution that will require tailoring to fit your organization and project’s outfit. Each option presents separate requirements and their own pros and cons. We will highlight that in a subsequent blog post here to help guide your decision beyond the definitions.