While offering many tangible benefits, application migration — the process of transferring a software solution from one computing environment to another — is always associated with certain risks. Data loss, budget overruns and security vulnerabilities are just a few examples of issues that can arise during your app migration journey, compromising overall project success.
To ensure a smooth app migration and secure your project’s ROI, your company must identify these and other risks early on, define a risk mitigation strategy, and follow it throughout the project. In other words, you should prepare and implement a risk management plan for app migration.
In this article, experts from Itransition, a company that provides app migration services, highlight the common risks associated with app migration and specify steps for building an efficient risk management plan.
What are the Most Common Application Migration Risks?
Application migration risks can vary from case to case, depending on various factors, such as the scope and complexity of the app migration. But from our experience, the following types of risks are among the most commonly encountered ones:
- Data loss
Due to various reasons (human error, data incompatibility, etc.), some corporate data can be corrupted or lost during the migration process, which can lead to operational disruptions, reputational damage, legal fees and other concerns for an organization.
- Unplanned downtime
Migration projects also entail the risk of technical failures, from software bugs to database crashes, which can compromise the performance of the migrated solution and cause downtime, resulting in operational and service disruptions.
- Budget overrun
Inaccurate migration scoping and inadequate planning can lead to unplanned expenses and significant budget overruns, which in turn can reduce the overall project ROI.
- Security vulnerabilities
If the migration team fails to address potential security vulnerabilities in the transferred application or its underlying infrastructure, an organization can become a victim of cybercriminals aiming to intercept and steal its data.
Risk Management Planning: Key Steps
To create a well-rounded and efficient plan supporting your app migration, an organization can follow this four-step algorithm:
- Identify the Most Probable Risks That Could Impact App Migration
As stated earlier, all app migration projects are unique, so to understand which risks pose the greatest threat in your unique business case, you should conduct some preliminary work, starting with the analysis of your overall migration context.
Specifically, you should carefully audit all digital assets you plan to migrate, as well as those that will be affected by the migration, including applications, databases and software integrations. You should carefully document all of these assets, as well as the dependencies that exist between them within your IT infrastructure. It is also important to carefully examine apps planned for migration in terms of their performance, security, and compatibility with the target environment.
Once you have collected and studied all this information, you can utilize various risk identification techniques to understand what potential migration pitfalls may arise. You can start by holding brainstorming sessions with your stakeholders (IT teams, business leaders, compliance officers, etc.) to find out what they think about potential risks and their probability.
It’s also key to review checklists addressing the risks common to your industry and business niche to assess their likelihood as well as learn from the experience of other organizations. Also, if your company has previously undertaken a similar migration project that encountered budget overruns, data loss, or other issues, you can investigate their root causes to understand how to avoid them in your upcoming initiative.
- Assess and Prioritize the Identified App Migration Risks
Once you have compiled a list of the most likely risks, examine each one to determine which of them pose the greatest threat and what impact they might have on your application, business processes, and organization as a whole. To perform an efficient risk analysis, you can use such a well-known technique such as a risk assessment matrix.
The simplest way to use the matrix is to build a two-axis chart, with the horizontal axis representing the likelihood of a risk (ranging from “high” to “low”) and the vertical axis representing the potential danger or impact of a risk (ranging from “negligible” to “crucial”). By distributing risks on this chart, you can prioritize risks and define which ones require the most attention. This will help you choose the right risk mitigation strategies in the future.
- Define the Right Risk Management Strategy for Your Migration Project
Once you have identified the risks and determined which ones to focus your mitigation efforts on, you should decide which strategies and tactics to include in your plan to effectively manage your unique challenges. For example, if there is a high risk of unplanned downtime, you should include a disaster recovery strategy in your plan to minimize the potential harm. If you risk facing a budget overrun, make sure your project budget includes contingency reserves to cover any unexpected expenses.
Regardless of which risks you consider most critical, it is essential to incorporate general risk management best practices into your plan. These can include backing up and encrypting all sensitive data before the migration, using continuous monitoring tools to detect emerging types of security threats, and implementing a change management strategy to ensure user adoption after the migration and minimize potential disruptions to your operations.
- Continuously Adjust Your Plan Even After the Migration Starts
Once your migration project begins, you should continually evaluate risks and the effectiveness of your risk management plan. Track key metrics such as the number of risks that occurred, the number of risks mitigated and the average time to resolve a risk to understand how adequate and reliable your plan is.
In case you refine your plan by incorporating additional risk mitigation tactics, communicate all substantial plan updates to the parties involved in the project to ensure that everyone remains on the same page.
Final Thoughts
Application migration comes with numerous risks, and you should be prepared to mitigate them to ensure a smooth and successful app transfer. Data loss, security vulnerabilities, budget overruns and unplanned downtime are some common pitfalls an organization risks facing throughout the migration journey. Nonetheless, you can mitigate these risks by implementing a robust risk management plan, and the brief guide provided in this article can help you develop one.
Navigating migration risks can be too daunting, especially if your organization has not previously been involved in app migration projects. In this case, it is advisable to contact third-party app migration experts. They will analyze the apps you are going to migrate, identify the most probable risks and provide a tailored risk management plan to guide you throughout the project, helping to secure your technology ROI.
