Data Transformation & Migration — A business imperative to transform challenges into opportunities

Digital transformation has changed the way we do business over the last two years, ushering in a digital-first world fuelled by an increasingly digital-first economy. The most significant impact of digital transformation is the way it has changed how we use data and analytics to inform and guide our decisions.

Data helps organisations understand their customers, generate new leads, and improve their bottom line. To stay competitive in the constantly evolving world of data, businesses must transform collected data into actionable insights that can be used to make informed decisions. This aligns to the Australian Government’s ambition to be among the top 3 digital governments in the world by 2025 and some of their efforts in developing a government architecture to provide a “personalised experience that is stable, secure, reliable, and ultimately anticipates the needs of every user.”

As a global leader in Enterprise Data Management, Syniti previously partnered with SAP to successfully deliver SAP data initiatives for thousands of clients within ANZ. Not only does SAP resell Syniti software such as SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti, but they also offer a wider range of accelerators to deliver customer SAP programs predictably and reliably.

With enterprises at the fore, emerging technologies have created great impact on product and service production and consumption, resulting in over 65% of Asia Pacific’s GDP being digitalised by 2022. However, increased integration and use of digital technology have presented companies with an abundance of data that they struggle to store, manage, and analyse. The need for data transformation and migration solutions has thus never been greater, and has created demand for data-driven solutions that can help companies clean, organise, and extract value from their data.

What is Data Migration

Data migration sees the moving of data from one system to another — involving a change in storage and database or application. Common causes of organisations migrating data are the desire to move to a newer system, upgrade current systems to newer versions, or to better support the organisation’s needs. Regardless of the exact purpose of data migration, the goal is generally to enhance performance and competitiveness among other benefits such as:

• Agility — As technology evolves, there is a need to upgrade to the best possible platform or application. The agility of seamlessly transferring data across different platforms and applications serves as an asset.
• Cost savings — Moving data to the cloud, for example, reduce costs on both hardware and labour. Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools move data to a cloud data warehouse, allowing organisations to cut data storage costs.
• Collaboration — Breaking down data silos ensure better collaborations between departments, and provide visibility into processes across the organisation.

Less successful migrations can produce inaccurate data that contains redundancies and unknowns — even when source data is fully usable and adequate. Existing issues in the source data may also be amplified when brought into a new, more sophisticated system.

How Does Data Transformation Play into Data Migration?

Data transformation makes data more organised, making it easier to use and comprehend for both computers and humans. This involves processes like data integration, data migration, data replication, and data wrangling. Without data transformation, integrating and moving data across sources will be challenging. Apart from the immediate financial impact, poor data quality or siloed complex data can lead to ill-informed decision-making in the long run.

Successful data transformations can yield enormous benefits, and the value of that accurate data only grows over time. Many organisations, however, struggle to capture real value from their data programs and thus see scant returns from investments totalling hundreds of millions. Without a clear inventory of available data, data users can spend between 30–40% of their time searching for data and 20–30% cleaning it.

Syniti Knowledge Platform and Syniti Migrate

Selecting the right data management platform that considers your organisational needs is crucial. It should simplify your transformation journey, and deliver advanced enterprise data migration, data management, governance, and analytics capabilities all with one unified, cloud-based solution. Thankfully, there are tools available today to automate much of this transition and migration. Comprehensive solutions like the Syniti Knowledge Platform have a proven reputation for reducing transformation risks with a targeted, data-driven approach to upgrading systems.

Syniti Knowledge Platform helps customers avoid the complexity, sprawl, and cost of multiple systems — by delivering a single, tightly-integrated solution with all necessary functions for frictionless data migrations in one location. Capabilities include migration-specific tooling, powerful data scanning and profiling, data replication, data cataloguing, data matching and deduplication, data quality, real-time project and data analytics, and built-in best practices.

In collaboration with SAP, Syniti also previously announced a premier service offering for customer migration to SAP S/4HANA, utilising a selective data transition approach with SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti. This offers SAP customers a trusted, flexible, and efficient way to migrate — whether on-premise or in the cloud. Research indicates that clients using SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti experienced significant business value, including:

• 303% three-year return on investment with an average eight-month payback on investment
• 46% faster completion of data migration projects
• 96% reduction of unplanned downtime

As part of their suite of solutions, Syniti also offers a fully cloud-based version of the Syniti Advanced Data Migration called Syniti Migrate, delivering frictionless enterprise data migrations in the simplest or the most sophisticated of scenarios.

In the past Syniti data migration platform has proved beneficial for organisations. For example, property Developers Australand, headquartered in Melbourne, underwent a major refurbishment of its IT systems when it switched from an existing ERP platform to SAP. As Australand’s business grew, its existing IT systems became increasingly fragmented and unstable. A decision was made to move to SAP, and at the heart of that undertaking was a complex data conversion effort lasting 14 months. Using Syniti’s data migration platform, the project ran smoothly, on time, and provided a rolling graphical update of the progress.

How will this pave the way for organisations in the new digital age

The digital world has shifted, making data migration more critical than ever. However research has revealed that ANZ organisations are lagging in modernising their mainframes, with only 16% having completed or nearing completion of their mainframe-to-cloud migration.

Data transformation and data migration are required to keep pace with the new digital age. The rapid pace of change in the digital world creates new opportunities and challenges that require new skills and expertise. Modern systems and infrastructures are built to enable modern methods of working — whether it’s flexibly, remotely, or across a variety of devices. Data migration, done with the right specialised tools and teams, not only improves productivity and performance, but also ensures security, accessibility, and efficiency.

Together, data transformation and data migration allow organisations to adapt and evolve to the changing landscape of the digital world, enabling them to deliver better services to their customers and increase their profitability.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/andranik123