Data migration
, "nearly 40 percent of data migration projects were over time, over budget, or failed entirely." As such, to achieve an effective data migration, proper planning is critical. While the specifics of a data migration plan may vary—sometimes significantly—from project to project, the computing company IBM suggests there are three main phases to most any data migration project: planning, migration, and post-migration. Each of those phases has its own steps. During planning, dependencies and requirements are analyzed, migration scenarios get developed and tested, and a project plan that incorporates the prior information is created. During the migration phase, the plan is enacted, and during post-migration, the completeness and thoroughness of the migration is validated, documented, closed out, including any necessary decommissioning of legacy systems. For applications of moderate to high complexity, these data migration phases may be repeated several times before the new system is considered to be fully validated and deployed.
Data conversion
Data conversion is the conversion of computer data from one format to another. Throughout a computer environment, data is encoded in a variety of ways. For example, computer hardware is built on the basis of certain standards, which requires that data contains, for example, parity bit checks. Similarly, the operating system is predicated on certain standards for data and file handling. Furthermore, each computer program handles data in a different manner. Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program. Even different versions of these elements usually involve different data structures. For example, the changing of bits from one format to another, usually for the purpose of application interoperability or of capability of using new features, is merely a data conversion. Data conversions may be as simple as the conversion of a text file from one character encoding system to another; or more complex, such as the conversion of office file formats, or the conversion of image formats and audio file formats.