Beyond Due Diligence: Why Reporting in Enterprise Data Migration Matters

The successful completion of a data migration project is highly dependent on the data management vendor you choose. Enterprise organizations need to evaluate several factors when choosing a data management vendor, including the level of effort and associated cost of the solution, the time it will take to complete the data migration project, and the support services the vendor offers.

Think about it like taking out a loan from the bank: you want to make sure that you choose the right lender for your specific needs. Whether it is for a house, car, or to start a business, you will want an institution that is dependable, can offer high service levels, and see the job through. 

However, there is a particular component that enterprises often overlook: Discovery and reporting.

What Enterprises Should Look For When Choosing a Data Management Vendor

Just as you wouldn’t pick a lender who failed to complete the proper paperwork required to process a loan, enterprises should be careful about choosing a data management provider that doesn’t prioritize discovery and reporting. Unfortunately, this often falls to the wayside during conversations between the hardware vendor, services sellers, and the customer.  

Why? Hardware sellers prefer to focus on selling hardware and typically leave discovery and reporting to the services sellers. Services sellers are under intense pressures to provide the most cost-effective solutions, which often means eliminating reporting functionality from standard package offerings.

A major gap and concern here is the improper scoping of an enterprise’s data migration project. Without accurate discovery information, a great deal of risk is introduced into the process of accurately architecting a hardware solution. Anyone who’s ever performed solution architecture will tell you “any risk adds cost to a project.” Reducing risk lowers the cost of the project, allowing hardware/services sellers to be more effective and, ultimately, more competitive on bids.

Reporting in Data Migration

An additional concern during a data migration project is guaranteeing a complete–and, more importantly, an accurate–migration. If the migration solution doesn’t include proper validation of the file content and its attributes, customers and/or services sellers could be financially liable for violations of compliance regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or HIPAA. 

Reporting at different stages of the sale and services implementation is crucial to the success of a data migration project. DobiMigrate is equipped with reporting capabilities from the beginning to after the end of the data migration process. Let’s take a look into the reporting abilities DobiMigrate provides at each stage of the service implementation.

Pre-Sales Data Assessment 

Before a migration project even begins, enterprises need to understand the characteristics of their data. For example, how much capacity is in use, how many files are stored, the mix of file sizes stored, the age of the data stored, and so on. Without this insight the ability to scope and plan a migration is limited. 

To address this, Datadobi offers a Pre-Migration Assessment Service which assists in delivering the most highly predictable and cost-effective NAS and object data migrations, with the fastest ROI possible. Leveraging the purpose-built capabilities of DobiMigrate, the service provides a detailed intelligence report that indicates an exhaustive inventory of file size, name and path, owner, type, time of creation, last opened, changes in attributes, and last modified. Having this granular insight into the data can ensure organizations are making the right decisions for their datasets. 

When organizations partner with Datadobi and utilize DobiMigrate for projects, they can rest assured knowing they have the thorough understanding required to accurately scope the right target hardware for their data.

The Migration Services Delivery Stage

Delivery professionals can spend anywhere from 20-30 hours collecting discovery information in complex environments, especially where a multi-vendor infrastructure is present. Collecting the required discovery data in a multi-vendor infrastructure involves installing multiple tools, running several different reports, and having to remediate while both interacting with the customer and also collecting and parsing data. 

DobiMigrate replaces these costly efforts with an automated discovery function, which takes only minutes to complete and provides support for many NAS and object platforms. Automation is crucial for a data migration to be fast and efficient while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the data.

Post-Migration Delivery 

Even post-migration, having access to the reporting can benefit enterprises with compliance requirements.

Datadobi offers an enhanced chain of custody (CoC) that, by default, proves every document, file, or electronic object is an exact copy of its counterpart on the source system at the time of the project. These CoC capabilities are unique to DobiMigrate. Deploying DobiMigrate with the CoC capabilities under a default ‘opt-in’ model provides a safety-net data protection for consumers. The software is designed to provide IT professionals, legal teams, and compliance officers the knowledge that the integrity of the filesystem data was preserved throughout the migration process.

DobiMigrate Makes Data Migration Easy For Enterprises

From the discovery and assessment, to job creation and remediation, to cutover and post-migration reporting, DobiMigrate provides automated discovery and reporting for the entirety of your data migration project. This automation allows for an easier yet more thorough delivery of complex migrations, including one-to-many, many-to-one, thousands of paths, billions of files, or highly-regulated data. 

Just as you would not want to loan from a bank who did not do their due diligence during the loan process, you shouldn’t pick a data management vendor who doesn’t pay attention to reporting. Reporting will allow your enterprise to gain more value from their data, and help adhere to compliance requirements.

Interested in purchasing DobiMigrate, with enhanced reporting capabilities, for your data migration project? Please visit the DobiMigrate page to learn more or contact us.