Heading into 2025, businesses are faced with managing increasingly complex data ecosystems. Maintaining data integrity when moving data has never been more critical, and ensuring it has become more challenging. Though often necessary, moving critical business data leaves organizations at risk of data loss and corruption. Businesses seeking to embrace data freedom must ensure both the ability to move the data and the preservation of its accuracy, completeness, and reliability during every migration.
Data Migration’s Impact on Data Integrity
Data integrity is essential to ensuring business continuity, and the movement of data poses a significant risk. A lack of pre-migration testing is the main cause of issues such as data corruption and data loss during the movement of data. These issues lead to unexpected downtime, reputational damage, and loss of essential information. As seen by this year’s global incident, one fault, no matter how small, can result in a significant negative impact on the business and its stakeholders. This incident sends a clear message – testing before implementation is essential. Without proper testing, organizations cannot identify potential issues and implement corrective measures.
Awareness and Preparation Are Key
Awareness is the first step to ensuring data integrity. Conducting data audits and integrity checks has been complicated by the amount of data at organizations’ disposal. Many organizations do not fully understand what data they have, when it was added or what was updated over time. Building awareness of data assets is the first step toward validating data and detecting abnormalities based on historical analyses.
Once establishing awareness, rigorous and ongoing testing for planned migration is crucial. This includes testing for both functionality, or how well the system operates after migration, and economics, the cost-effectiveness of the system or application. Functionality testing ensures a system continues to meet expectations. Economics testing involves examining resource consumption, service costs and overall scalability to ascertain whether the solution is economically sustainable for the business. This is particularly important with cloud-based migrations. While organizations can manually conduct these audits, tools on the market can also help can conduct regular automated data integrity audits. These audits detect inconsistencies across backup files, allowing businesses to rectify and ensure data recoverability.
Preparing for migration is a bit like how pilots train to resolve the unexpected. Pilots plan and train for emergency situations, thereby reducing risks in the unlikely event of a crash landing or route diversion. By planning for the potential problems businesses may encounter during data transfer across systems and platforms, the risk and impact of compromised data are minimized.
Even if companies don’t anticipate immediate changes, it remains important to prepare for migrations. Just as pilots do not wait for poor flying conditions to train for an emergency landing or response, businesses should not wait for a notification of imminent change to initiate data checks and testing. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and in today’s volatile and fast-paced technological environment, organizations need to always be prepared to avoid being caught off-guard.
Enabling Data Freedom with Data Integrity and Secure Backups
A robust data backup and recovery plan is the last line of defense for organizations, and yet many organizations miss this crucial step. Our 2024 Ransomware Trends Report found that 65% of organizations did not have a recovery plan for a site-level crisis, and only 50% had immutable backups. A lack of backups significantly impairs a business’s ability to restore corrupted, lost, or stolen data efficiently and avoid major disruptions. Protecting data doesn’t have to be complicated, There are simple steps companies can take to safeguard their data and enhance data resilience. By following the 3-2-1-1-0 rule, which recommends storing three copies of data across two different media types, with one copy offsite, one copy air-gapped, and with zero errors, businesses can significantly boost their data resilience.
Data freedom is more than just the ability to move data. Data freedom ensures data remains accurate, secure, and usable during any migrations or platform changes. Businesses should be able to rely on their data when it matters most. Regular testing and data assessments ensure this is possible by maintaining both integrity and freedom. A solid backup and recovery plan acts as a safety net, when all else fails, by ensuring the ability to bounce not just back, but forward, efficiently if anything goes wrong. In the unlikely event something fails during migration, organizations with a backup and recovery plan have peace of mind they can restore data completely and efficiently, minimizing downtime and disruption to business operations.