If you’ve been reading the news this week, you may have heard that TSB was fined a shocking £49 million for an IT disaster that happened in 2018. When the bank tried to migrate to a new computer system, things went wrong. Because of an error, customers couldn’t get to their money through any part of the banking system, including branch, phone, and online banking.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said that 5.2 million customers were affected, and even eight months later, problems were still being reported.
Due to the size of the problem, the FCA have fined TSB £29.75 million, and the Prudential Regulation Authority added another £18.9 million.
Even though this type of disruption is (thankfully) rare, it shows how important it is to plan an IT cloud migration well.
If you’re thinking about migrating to a new platform in 2023, you need to work with a team that can look at your business as a whole while the migration is happening. Planning carefully will not only make the transition much easier to deal with, but it can also help prevent a wide range of possible IT disasters.
Here are some things to think about before coming up with a plan for your IT migration strategy.
Think about all the risks
Before you start, you should give careful thought to the different things that could go wrong with your IT platform migration.
For instance, legacy systems could cause problems because they might not work with the latest security patches or bug fixes. When you switch to a new system, you could also make critical mistakes if you don’t test enough or don’t understand the source data.
We’ve seen first-hand what happens when a move to the cloud doesn’t get enough care and attention. Problems are often caused by something as simple as bad communication. For example, a planned migration could cause problems in other parts of the business that weren’t expected.
However, with careful planning, you should be able to mitigate these risks.
Look at your business as a whole
Make sure you look at your business as a whole when you plan. Your IT team isn’t the only one that needs to be involved in planning. You also need to think about each department to make sure that no one is unfairly affected.
At this point in the planning process, you need to work with other people. Have you checked to see if different departments use any software that could cause problems with your chosen platform? If you use software from a third-party vendor, working together will give you a chance to make sure that the migration won’t break another part of your IT infrastructure.
Reducing downtime
When we manage IT migrations for businesses, we work alongside their internal staff to make sure there is as little downtime as possible. This is why our migration plans usually happen overnight or over the weekend. This gives us time to fix any problems before your staff comes in to start work.
The data migration process can take longer than expected, which is one of the biggest problems with any IT migration plan.
If your system goes down during this time, it could cause problems for both your employees and customers outside of your company. So, you need to plan for these time frames or make backup plans so that your staff and customers don’t suffer while the migration is happening.
Prepare for bad things to happen
As part of your IT migration plans, you need to be clear about your disaster recovery procedures. As well as making sure you have full backups of your data, you should also be clear about how you plan to get that data back if you lose it.
During the cloud migration, it is easy for unwanted data to corrupt systems, which can cause big problems for the end user. So, you need to make sure you have plans for dealing with disasters in case they happen.
Lucid Systems can help you make the most of your IT migration
If you are ready for a new IT system, don’t handle the transition on your own.
Our team of experienced engineers can work with you and your in-house teams to make sure that your move to the cloud goes smoothly. We can not only help you migrate your data, but we can also help you create a migration strategy, making sure that you have plans for every possible outcome.
We handle projects from start to finish and can help you migrate to the cloud. We can also work with your internal IT managers to help with your IT migration strategy and provide additional hands-on resources and support.
