Don't Let These Data Migration Challenges Derail Your Project

You likely don't know anyone who genuinely enjoys taking on a big, difficult, and risky challenge, the kind that can stall your entire business. Yet, you face these challenges because you must.

And in the world of IT, no project is more universally dreaded and perilous than a data migration.

Even with a background in storage and data systems, I was stunned by the statistics revealing just how badly these projects tend to go.

To understand the common missteps, I spoke with the professional services team at Pure Storage. What I learned reveals that the path to success isn't about working harder, but about working smarter, often by admitting you need expert help.

The Hidden Dangers You're Probably Underestimating

You know that any IT project can overrun its budget or schedule. Typically, you can mitigate these risks with focused planning and disciplined execution, tasks your IT team excels at. But data migration is a special case.

It's not a routine task, and its apparent simplicity is a trap. It seems straightforward until a cascade of hidden dangers derails it completely.

Storage isn't just about putting bits on a disk; it's one layer in a critical chain of information.

Your business-critical data has a long and complicated life within your organization. It's easy to lose track of its origins and, more importantly, its countless dependencies.

As Tom Schroeder, Vice President of Global Professional Services at Pure Storage, said,

This lack of understanding is a foundational crack in your project plan. Beyond the business context, there is often a critical knowledge gap regarding the technology itself.

A successful migration requires a deep, intimate understanding of both the source and destination systems, knowledge that only comes from daily exposure.

Your list of considerations is long. You and your business units must work together to sort out data ownership, define necessary data cleansing, and negotiate complex downtime windows.

All of this is on top of your IT team's basic need to execute the physical migration, validate the new environment, and bring applications back online.

It’s an overwhelming process, but the solution is simple: when a project exceeds your team's capabilities and experience, you bring in the experts.

Why Bringing in the Experts is Your Smartest Move?

You might be an engineer at heart, proud of your ability to solve complex problems. It’s tempting to believe that with enough time and coffee, you can accomplish anything. But is it "cheating" to engage professional services?

On the contrary, it is the strategically smart thing to do. A professional services team brings two things you lack: deep, specialized knowledge and a proven, rigorous framework for success. These teams execute similar projects every single day; for you, it's a rare and high-stakes event.

Pure Storage’s team, for example, operates on an “evaluate, activate, innovate” framework designed to guide you through the entire transformation journey.

One of their most critical tools is the strategy workshop, where their experts engage with your IT teams and business owners to develop a deep, shared understanding of the data being moved.

“This is the stuff that I really love,” Tom shared.

These workshops are fundamental to success, providing a moderated approach to help you truly comprehend your business challenges, whether you're migrating data, reducing costs, or evolving your cloud strategy.

The "Unknown Unknowns" That Derail Projects

You can plan for the risks you can see, but the most dangerous threats are the ones you haven't anticipated. Data migrations are fraught with "unknown unknowns", hidden dependencies on forgotten applications, undocumented data relationships, and legacy systems that no current employee fully understands.

These shadows in your IT landscape only reveal themselves mid-migration, causing unexpected outages, data corruption, or security vulnerabilities.

A professional services team acts as your scout, having navigated similar terrain countless times before.

They bring pre-built checklists and discovery tools designed to shine a light on these hidden obstacles before they can sabotage your timeline and budget.

The Critical Role of Data Governance Before You Move a Single Byte

Many organizations treat data governance as a post-migration cleanup task, which is a catastrophic mistake. Attempting to migrate "dirty," ungoverned data only amplifies its problems and bakes them into a new, more modern system.

You must first answer fundamental questions: What data is redundant? What is obsolete? Who is the true business owner authorized to decide its fate?

Implementing a basic governance framework, defining ownership, quality standards, and lifecycle rules, before the migration is not a delay; it is an essential step that reduces the volume of data to be moved, simplifies the process, and ensures you're investing in transferring valuable assets, not digital landfill.

The Human Element: Overcoming Internal Resistance to Change

Your migration plan may be technically flawless, but it will fail if it doesn't account for the people who use the data every day. Business units are often deeply skeptical of IT-led migrations, fearing disruption to their workflows or loss of control.

This resistance manifests as missed deadlines for validation, refusal to sign off on data sets, and a general lack of cooperation.

The strategy workshops offered by experts are as much about change management as they are about technology.

They create a collaborative environment where business leaders become co-architects of the solution, building the buy-in and sense of shared ownership that are critical for a smooth cutover and long-term adoption.

Why a "Lift-and-Shift" Migration is a Missed Opportunity

It's tempting to execute a simple "lift-and-shift," moving your data and applications exactly as they are to a new platform. While this seems faster, it often forfeits the greatest value of a migration: transformation.

You are simply replicating old inefficiencies on new, expensive hardware. A better approach is to use the migration as a forcing function for modernization.

Could this data be better structured? Could these applications be refactored for the cloud? Professional services don't just help you move; they help you improve.

Their "innovate" phase is dedicated to identifying these opportunities, ensuring your migration delivers not just a new location for your data, but a genuine step-change in performance, cost, and agility.

Quantifying the Risk: The True Cost of "Do-It-Yourself" Failure

When considering the cost of professional services, you must weigh it against the staggering true cost of a failed DIY migration. This isn't just about blown budgets.

Calculate the potential revenue loss per hour of downtime for your critical applications. Factor in the cost of a full team working nights and weekends on emergency remediation for weeks on end.

Consider the long-term brand damage and erosion of customer trust from a major public outage. The fee for an expert team is a predictable, fixed cost that acts as an insurance policy against these open-ended, potentially catastrophic business losses.

The question isn't "Can we afford to hire help?" but rather, "Can we afford not to?"

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Don't Gamble Your Business on a Long Shot

The reality is that nearly every data migration project is more complicated than it first appears. The cost of failure isn't just a delayed project; it's downtime for business-critical applications, which has a direct and painful impact on your revenue and operations.

It’s no wonder these projects are so often "kicked down the road," becoming a problem for a future team.

Engaging a professional services team is the most effective way to overcome these hurdles and dramatically improve your chances of success.

Pure Storage is one example, but every major infrastructure provider and many channel partners offer similar capabilities.

The lesson is clear: you can lessen the immense risk of your data migration project by being smart enough to bring in the experts. You’ll be profoundly glad that you did.

However, even the most expertly executed migration is only the first step. Once your data is on its new, modern platform, the next critical challenge emerges: governing and activating it efficiently at scale. A tool like DataManagement.AI becomes your strategic advantage.

It provides the intelligent control plane that professional services teams can't leave behind, automating data quality, enforcing governance policies, and providing the observability needed to ensure your newly migrated data becomes a trusted, high-performance asset, not just data in a new location.

In a multi-cloud world, this ongoing management is not a luxury; it's the core of your data ROI.

Thank you for reading

DataMigration.AI & Team