Four Golden Rules Of Successful Data Migration By Celona's Tony Sceales And Data Migration Expert John Morris

Not all migrations are equal. Many migrations are fairly straightforward and motivated purely by technical or IT drivers. For example, at the storage level companies might need to migrate their data to cheaper forms of storage, and at the database level they might need to mirror data to another disk. At the application level, however, data migration can be very complex in large enterprises because it needs to span both technical and business issues. According to Bloor's Phil Howard, Forbes 2,000 companies already spend at least $5 billion per year on migrations, and yet 80% of them still go over time or over budget.

To understand why this is the case it is firstly important to recognize how complex IT infrastructures have arisen. Often they mirror an enterprise's history and have come about as the result of mergers and acquisitions, organic growth, product launches, new initiatives and so on compounded over many years. While individual parts of the infrastructure might be well architected, robust and functional, the overall structure might be poorly understood and far from optimal. However while IT optimization might be desirable, unpicking this complexity is far from easy and risks catastrophic failure – such as lack of availability of business-critical data or failure of service or product delivery systems.

Tony Sceales
A science graduate of the University of Wales, Tony has spent over 20 years building and managing major products and development programmes in the global software industry. Much of that time has been working in Telecoms markets with the balance in the Reinsurance, Banking and Systems Software sectors.

He co-founded SESI Ltd as a solutions and systems integration business in 1997, successfully transforming to form Celona Technologies in 2004. He has been CEO of Celona, leading the strategic thinking behind the growth of the company, since then.

Prior to Celona Technologies, Tony worked in senior architectural and management roles with British Telecom plc, IBM (Australia), Prudential Reinsurance (USA) and AON.