Migration to Management: Benefits of Database Modernization

Getting more customers to sign up than ever before: That’s success, right? Well, for the sales team, it probably is. But how does your IT team or customer relations specialist feel about it? How does the team that manages your database feel?

To grow, you need more customers and clients. But just as obviously, you need to continually update your technology and processes to keep delivering the kind of performance that brought in all those new customers in the first place. Sure, you can hire more people and maybe expand your server space, but internal database management isn’t that easy to scale.

You should consider migrating to a more modern, full-featured database platform rather than just extending it. Expanding your capacity with the same essential architecture is a situation of diminishing returns, and the curve becomes very steep very quickly.

Database modernization typically means converting or migrating your old database from MS SQL or Oracle, which are rapidly becoming legacy software, make no mistake, to newer open source relational databases (RDBs), like PostgreSQL or MySQL. If you use a lot of microservices, it might mean switching to something like NoSQL, which was designed specifically for that type of use.

However, nothing in IT is ever simple. A complete database modernization project might also include changing the entire database platform. That sounds expensive, but it can open up a whole new world of easy scalability and lower license costs. It could mean rehosting in the cloud to make your operations more agile and reduce project overhead. Or it could mean refactoring your applications to reduce the load on your existing database systems to manageable levels.

New data solutions appear almost daily, and each innovation has one or two things that it is at least supposed to do better than anything else on the market. Gone are the days when having two underlying technology options was a luxury. In any case, the large number of options can be an obstacle. It is almost impossible for an expert to know everything about all the solutions available today.

That means it’s a golden age for data modernization, and the days of your legacy software are truly limited. You’ll want to seriously consider a managed migration to your new all-dancing database platform. Expert help can reduce project costs and time and maybe even prevent some of the worst case scenarios they always talk about.

Now that you understand what database modernization is and why you can’t avoid it much longer, take a look at some things that a managed migration to a new database platform could do for you and your organization.

Any analytics operation requires you to capture and process data, and the more the merrier. A faster, more efficient, and more agile database can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your analytics efforts.

One benefit that almost every organization will love is the quantum leap in data processing efficiency that it will experience. Data modernization gives you new capabilities in terms of data visualization, data storage, and data extraction, as well as making your existing analytics tasks run faster.

Of course, doing more with less is the holy grail of management. Data modernization can turn the need for more skilled employees into excess capacity. Now, in a recovering economy, filling that capacity will be far less of a challenge than recruiting ever was.

How difficult would it be to make a business case for a project that would improve your data processing and analysis capabilities while lowering the total cost of ownership of your growing database? Well, reduced real-world costs are a stated goal of virtually every migration Liquid Web manages.

Data modernization enables business growth that might not otherwise have been possible, but it does much more than you might think to foster successful scale-up operations. Task automation improves operational efficiency, allowing you to get more done with the same piece of equipment. Added analytics capability usually improves customer service as you grow as well.

The ability to react to events in real time can be a game changer. Sales, transactions and whatever you’re tracking happens all the time. Learning about them in a report at the end of the day or at the end of the week is better than learning nothing about them, but imagine the decision-making advantage you would have if you could see the real and current state. with a few clicks.

The conclusion is obvious: you need to modernize the data, which means migration. You need the migration to go smoothly, which means a managed migration. But what would the migration look like? There are three main phases:

Here Liquid Web will oversee the copy of all your existing data to the new platform, which will run in parallel while you continue to use the old system.

This is the new database verification process: making sure the new system does everything it takes to make it work for you with no nasty surprises on day one.

This is the last big step. Checks are made to confirm that the new database is fully functional, has the most recent valid data from the old system, and receives new data of its own. This is also when the new platform goes live.

Database modernization doesn’t have to be a scary proposition. Liquid Web is here to help you with your migration and ensure that your new platform is an improvement in every way.