Best Practice: Use an ETL Tool
When it comes to migrating data during a legacy system modernization, teams are often tempted to lean on what they know — manual exports, spreadsheets, or long chains of SQL scripts.
While these methods can work for small or one-off jobs, they don’t scale, lack transparency, and introduce substantial risk to complex migrations. If your modernization effort involves multiple tables, rules, and stakeholders, then it’s time to use a proper ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool.
In this post, we explore why using an ETL tool is a best practice for modern data migration projects and what you gain by choosing this structured, repeatable, and auditable approach over manual alternatives.
Best Practice: Use a Proven Approach
Data migration is one of the most complex and risk-prone aspects of any legacy system modernization project. Yet far too often, teams jump in without a clear strategy — relying on ad hoc methods, tribal knowledge, and hopeful thinking.
This is where projects go off the rails.
Whether you're migrating from a 30-year-old mainframe or a decade-old ERP, the best practice is clear:
Use a proven, repeatable, and structured approach to data migration.
In this article, we explain what a proven approach looks like, why it’s essential, and what can go wrong when you skip it.
Best Practice: Start Early
It all begins with an idea.When organizations take on legacy system modernization, there’s one critical aspect that often gets underestimated or delayed: data migration.
It’s common to see teams focus heavily on application architecture, UI/UX improvements, cloud infrastructure, and performance enhancements — all important components of modernization. But leaving data migration until later in the project is a costly mistake.
Best practice dictates that data migration should start early — sometimes even before the main modernization project kicks off. Why? Because data is the lifeblood of your organization, and preparing it for a new system is far more complex than simply “moving it over.”
In this post, we explore why early data migration planning and execution is essential, and what activities you can (and should) begin immediately to de-risk your modernization effort.