Now that you’ve nailed down the planning stage for your upcoming data migration, it’s time to dive into the next critical step: prepping the data. How do you ensure the data is clean and ready to move? What steps are necessary to validate and prepare the data for its new home in Salesforce?
Preparing the data is essential to avoid any hiccups during the transition. This involves backing up and transforming the data to align with the target system’s requirements while giving you and your team confidence that you can refer back to historical data if and when it’s needed. In this blog, we’ll cover the key steps and best practices for getting your data ready for a smooth and successful migration.
Backing Up Data
Before interacting with the source and target systems, we must ensure that all of the data is fully backed up. If anything goes wrong, you would want to be able to restore the original data and start over. Typically, companies will design and discuss a rollback plan for such situations. It’s important to agree early on with all parties involved about where the data will be stored. To keep everyone informed and to solidify the agreement, ensure the appropriate people obtain official sign-offs once the process is confirmed and before any backups are created.
In addition, determine with the appropriate stakeholders what happens with any “out-of-scope data”—will it still be retained somewhere, or will it be deleted? For example, if the company wants to keep this data, it may be decided that they will need to make provisions for storing it securely. Will it be your responsibility or someone elses? Make sure you and your team know! Taking these steps not only safeguards your data but also ensures a smoother transition with minimal disruptions.
Transforming Data
If you’ved been tasked with also transforming the company’s data for import into Salesforce, it is best practice to design and execute a data transformation process that produces the desired result.
In Salesforce, it is likely that a company uses specific formats for fields such as dates and place names. Data formats in the company’s source system, however, may not match those in Salesforce. Therefore, you must identify any mismatched formats and determine what kind of transformation is needed to align them with the client’s Salesforce formatting. For example, you may need to convert U.S. state names into standard, two-letter state codes before you can import this data into Salesforce.
When you export data from the source system, you must ensure that you keep the original IDs, which will become foreign keys (or external IDs) in Salesforce. You can use these foreign keys to identify each original record and confirm that data relationships in the target system match what you expect to see. During testing, foreign keys are the matching criteria that can be used to verify success.
After deploying to the Production system, you need to verify that the data has arrived complete and intact without disrupting the client’s Salesforce system. All automation, data relationships, and reports should remain unchanged. To achieve this, you must devise a strategy to conclusively measure the migration’s level of success. If failures occur, the testing should help identify the issues and point toward solutions. We mentioned some test strategies we recommend for data migrations in a previous post, but here are a few more articles to help guide you in determining the best testing approaches for your projects!
Stay tuned for our next blog on executing the data migration! Got a burning question that can’t wait? Let’s chat!
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