IT Glossary
What is data migration?
Moving data from the old system into the new one — customers, stock, history — the underestimated operation that makes or breaks the project.
Every system change — a new ERP, a new CRM, a new e-commerce platform — has a glamorous half, the new features, and a plumbing half nobody mentions during the demo: data migration, the movement of customers, products, stock, balances and history out of the old system and into the new one. The industry’s sad statistic is that this is the number one cause of delays and missed launches, for reasons that repeat with clockwork precision. Old data is dirtier than anybody believes — duplicate customers under three spellings, phantom products, historical balances nobody can explain any more — and migration drags all of it into daylight whether you wanted it or not. Structures differ, because the old system kept address in one field while the new one wants street, city and county, and a human being has to decide the transformation field by field. And the sheer volume of business decisions surprises people: how much history moves, what happens to incomplete records, who signs off that the migrated totals match reality. The recipe distilled from the migrations that failed is deeply unglamorous — clean before moving, rehearse on a copy validated against control figures, put key users on the migrated data for a week before the go-live decision, and plan the cutover window properly, keeping the old system readable afterwards as both safety net and legal archive.
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Why it matters for your business
The company’s history crosses the border intact
Customers, balances and relevant history arrive in the new system validated against control figures — not approximately everything, we hope.
A spring clean on the way out
Deduplication and tidied reference data done for the migration remain a permanent gain — the new system starts clean instead of inheriting the rubbish.
A launch that does not cost you trust
A rehearsal plus user validation means the numbers add up on day one — the exact moment the team decides whether it will believe the new system at all.
Frequently asked questions
How much history is worth migrating into the new system?
Less than the instinct to take everything suggests. Normally master data moves in full — customers, suppliers, products — together with open balances and open documents, plus one or two years of transactional history for comparability. The rest stays in the old system kept read-only, or in a queryable archive. Every extra year is cleaning and transformation cost, and legal retention asks you to keep records, not to migrate them.
Who is responsible for the migration — us or the new system’s vendor?
Both, with the boundary written down. The vendor carries the technical work of extraction, transformation, loading and tooling; your company carries the decisions and the validation — what the data means, what gets cleaned and how, and the final signature confirming the numbers match. The classic trap is each side assuming the other is checking. Put a named owner on each side into the contract, alongside a mandatory rehearsal and acceptance criteria expressed as control figures.
How long does migration take, and why can it not happen over a weekend?
The move itself may take hours; the migration project takes weeks or months, because the hard part comes first — cleaning the data, mapping field to field, repeating rehearsals until validation passes. The weekend is only the final cutover window, and only if those rehearsals passed. A proposal promising serious migration in two days has either not seen your data or intends to discover the problems in production, at your expense.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247