Migration: A Topic of Information Technology or the Physical Movement by Humans?

If you just type in “migration” into your favorite search engine, you might find different results. Some are about sociology, like the physical movement by humans, some might be about animals traveling in search for a new habit, but you also might find results regarding information technology.

Congratulations! If that is what you are looking for, you found it. But what exactly is a migration when we talk about information technology? First of all you should know that there are some different migrations to think of. We can talk about a data migration, an architecture migration, a software migration and a language migration. Broadly speaking, it is about software and hardware migration. However, for today let’s just talk about what kind of changes are possible when we talk about migration in general.

First of all there is the update, also known as patch. Here everything stays within the software product line. There should be no big troubles embedding the latest version into the system environment and all updates should however be possible and from this time on useable without special trained staff. And of course: Nobody has to get new devices due to the update and also nobody has to get a new software license.

Need more than just a software update?

The next form of a migration would be the upgrade. This is generally a replacement of hardware, software or firmware with a newer or better version, so that the upgrade affects the product itself or the compatibility with its environment. Here again, everything stays within the software product line. Existing databases can be migrated with little effort and therefore sufficient tools are provided by the producer, so that no external support is needed.

The kind of migration that has the most impact is for sure the one which replaces a whole system so in this case; we leave the software product line or skip at least one generation of the product. In most cases there is a lack of required migration tools and therefore experts are needed to ensure the overall functionality of the system.

So if you ever consider the last form of migration, be aware that there are two ways to think of it: You can either choose a target date on which the migration will take place at a time or you might consider a step-by-step migration. Sounds interesting? More on that later… Thanks for following our blog!