When a company alters its business processes, there is an immediate knock on effect on the application level. Legacy applications have to be retired. Data needs to be transferred from one business application to another. Application users and processes need to be managed and synchronised. In some cases, whole suites of applications have to be upgraded and implemented. All of these activities need to be carried out with minimum disruption to business operations.

Managing these changes on the application level involves migrating large and often complex volumes of data, but few IT departments are capable of handling this challenge. Typically, a data migration project follows a certain pattern – IT personnel start out with the best of intentions; they then discover that the process is far more complex than envisioned; costs begin to spiral and projects overrun by months, and in some cases years. Sometimes projects fail altogether, incurring huge costs for companies.

Current approach

The functionality gap between traditional ETL and business applications (click to enlarge diagram)

Traditional approaches to data migration solutions – such as ETL – have their roots in ageing database technologies not suited for handling complex application data migration projects. Times have changed. Today’s applications are closely tied into business processes – in fact, it is hard to know where an application ends and a business process begins. Furthermore, companies are dealing with a much higher volume of business data than they did ten years ago. And they are handling this data on a 24/7 basis.

A new way of handling application data migration is required – and Celona has created it.

Celona application data migration solutions – Zero downtime

Celona's business-centric approach to application data migration (click to enlarge diagram)

Celona has solved the problem of moving data in between legacy and new applications, while synchronising the data and supporting interdependent business processes. The company’s Celona Evolve platform for application data migration can migrate data, processes, users and applications and synchronise these elements at the same time across a wide range of IT environments. This means Celona’s application data migration solutions can manage changes in data and business processes during a project rather than afterwards, which gives clients maximum flexibility and agility and ensures they enjoy zero downtime.

Celona’s Application Data Migration solutions (ADM) expose business objects rather than rows and columns, enabling users to take an active part in driving the data migration process. These solutions are capable of supporting upgrades, application replacements and full transformation projects across international borders.

The company’s application data migration solutions deliver results 90% faster than traditional ETL and transactional database replication methods. They also enable an organisation to use up to 50% less resource.

Progressive migration

Progressive Migration is a flexible strategy for application level data migration. It involves different migration approaches, which are used depending upon the business need.

Celona’s Evolve application data migration platform enables users to exploit all of these different data migration approaches. Celona’s agile approach to data migration allows IT to offer the business five migration methods to suit employee and business applications. These options are:

• Don’t migrate - where a system is implemented in a greenfield situation and only new data is put into the new application via business processes. Data migration is not required, however reverse synchronisation may be needed as some of the data may be strategic to both legacy systems and the new application.
• (Business) Event-based Migration - migration of data upon a business trigger, where an event such as a customer requesting new product initiates a migration of related data from old systems to new applications. Only the data that needs to be migrated is copied, and the migration can be controlled by the business process. Celona’s total synchronisation (which is bi-directional) ensures data is replicated in all relevant systems and applications.
• Incremental Migration – the incremental approach to data migration allows the slicing and dicing of the source data to be migrated in line with the business needs. Over time different selections of data slices are defined to reflect changing business priorities. The business migrates people and process at its own pace. Throughout this process total synchronisation ensures all originating and destination systems are kept in sync.
• Bulk-load Migration – the bulk load process migrates fewer, but large slices of data from old systems to new applications, but does not move all the business processes at the same time. Throughout this process total synchronisation ensures originating systems and destination applications are kept in sync.
• Big bang - migrate a significant portion of one or more systems’ data and all business processes are migrated in one leap. With Celona, the risks associated with big-bang approaches are minimised because Celona allows data migration to be completed independently of the system, users, and business process migration.

With Celona, the business may choose to change the migration strategy at any stage in the migration project. Furthermore, in many cases they are working against the clock – companies need to get their products and services to market as quickly as possible.