Data Center Migration Success: Execution

You thought it would never happen. You’ve carefully investigated your requirements and planned your data center migration and now you can start to execute that plan. It’s a risky time, you don’t want to do anything that will interrupt user access or take out critical applications. Here are a few tips to help you overcome challenges as you move.

Pre-Flight Checks

You know the company blackout days to avoid, you’ve created a plan for the move, now’s the time to put that plan into action. But before you do, make sure:

• If you are moving physical equipment, you know where it all is, when it’s being transferred, and where it’s going to (also that all equipment you ordered is being delivered on schedule).
• You’ve cleaned up data and removed anything that you don’t need going forward.
• You’ve put a plan in place to back up data – if anything goes awry you need to correct things quickly to avoid business disruption.
• Everyone involved with the move has a copy of the project plan, checklist and a full list of task owners and contact details.
• You have back-up teams ready to help where required, including helpdesk personnel and engineers to answer queries and implement rollbacks.
• Teams know the rollback process and the triggers for implementing rollbacks.
• Everyone is aware of the sign-off process for tasks and the cues for them to begin their part of the rollout.
• Your validation team is available when they are required.

Be Flexible

With multiple steps and interdependent workflows, you’ll need to carefully keep a steely eye on each and every step to ensure you start the next workflow at the correct time.

• You have to be able to be able to quickly implement your mitigation plan(s) if there are any issues down the workflow line and be ready to implement rollbacks if required.
• Stay in communication with teams, making sure every task is checked off to keep a clear view of your assets during the process, to limit security issues.
• Sign off each stage of the plan with your stakeholders and follow your validation plan.
• Once you completed execution and validated success, communicate the end of the project to your organization.
• Create reports sharing outcomes in a final project meeting with key stakeholders.

While much of the data center move may be in the hands of other project stakeholders, including third parties, you need to have a clear vision at every stage of the execution phase. That’s going to mean constant phone calls and emails to ensure that every step is completed, taking up a lot of your team’s time.

Even once you’ve completed your move and validated success, the data center migration program isn’t over. Following the move, you need to manage the disposal of old assets, incorporating them in your IT asset disposition (ITAD) program and find a way to continually monitor your current assets, their requirements and team usage, the data center environment, hardware and other factors to optimize your investment. Find out how best to do this to save costs, enhance performance and the end user service experience.

Adopt Automation to replace over 50% of Manual Tasks

ReadyWorks believes in using automation at every stage of the data center migration project to replace repetitive manual tasks and simplify the execution of plan by:

• Providing you with a single holistic view of project data so you can easily monitor progress.
• Orchestrating tools, system and team tasks triggered by milestones and events so that tasks such as data backups and transfers aren’t missed and happen at the appropriate time.
• Allowing stakeholders to mark task completion in a central location, to automatically update your view and trigger the start of the next task.
• Using a self-service portal to ease the validation processes, cutting the time you and your team spend chasing updates.
• Providing real-time, customizable dashboards that allow you to see how the project is progressing or how tweaks and mitigation plans affect the entire rollout and timeline. You can share links with key stakeholders so that they can easily see progress, further cutting demands on your time.

Up Next in our 4-part series on Data Center Migration Success: Optimization.

Ready to find out how ReadyWorks can help you manage the execution phase of your data center transformation more efficiently?

Schedule a demo today.