With nearly half of businesses reporting hacks every year, companies are constantly looking for more stable data solutions. One of the ways to ensure a more secure company is to run a server migration to a more secure location. However, if you’re underprepared, you could throw a wrench into productivity at your company.

Here’s how you can ensure your migration goes smoothly.

Start Housecleaning

Before you decide to migrate, you need to clean up what’s on your current servers. Old sites, email accounts, unnecessary backups, or outdated assets should be jettisoned. Migrating this data will not only cause it to take longer and cost more, but you could be moving security issues from one server to the next.

For data that you might need, consider archiving it from your production server. You can keep data somewhere else but your production server should be as lean as possible.

Having less data also means fewer post-migration issues. You need your migration window to be as tiny as possible so that you can get back to work. By cleaning up the junk from your server, you’ll be able to keep things moving and start off on the right foot.

Run An Inventory

While it might be grueling and take some time, you need to inventory the contents of your server. If you’re running just one site, email accounts and pages should be easy to handle. However, most enterprises have multiple sites which multiples the complexity of the problems.

Subdomains, databases, and email accounts make your whole system run slower and take up more space. Creating an inventory of what you have can help you understand what you actually need.

Take an inventory that counts your server’s many domains, subdomains, aliases, add-ons, databases, and email accounts. If you have redundant or unnecessary email accounts, get rid of them. Zombie user accounts or email addresses can be instrumentalized by nefarious actors to hack into your system.

Your inventory is a checklist to ensure that all of the data you need is migrated to your new site. You get to ensure that no accounts are skipped and that DNS is properly set up for each domain.

Size Matters

When you’re ordering a new server, it’s easy to underestimate your size needs. Disk space is growing everywhere but lots of companies fail to realize that it’s not growing by a percentage. It’s growing exponentially.

As more users are more productive with smaller devices on faster connections, they expect lots of server-side processing. You can’t send a video to a browser and let them optimize it for your users’ screens. You need to do that processing on your end.

That means you need lots of space and lots of power. You need lots of space to both move your data and then unpack it all. You also want to leave plenty of room for your business to grow.

Take your most generous estimate for your size needs and double it.

Email Matters Too

If you’re going to be migrating email, you need to let your staff know they should clean out their inboxes and save important files. In fact, now would be a great time to implement a limit on how long emails will sit in company inboxes.

Give your migration company a set of organized information on your current email service. Check that they don’t need more information from you before the migration.

Update Passwords

Moving data leaves your data vulnerable to be intercepted. If your old server wasn’t as secure as your new one, old passwords could be added, with hackers following you to your new server. Make sure that everyone updates every password.

If you haven’t implemented two-factor authentication yet, now would be the time. During a migration, it’s much easier to implement and test new systems than afterward. Your staff will want to move past the interruptions and get to being productive again.

Set Access Levels

Your migration team is going to have to be able to access everything on your server before they can begin. That’s the only way that they can match up your server environments and move you seamlessly from one server to the next.

Create accounts to give them root access and user-level ssh. This access will make their job easier and the whole process smoother.

While you’re in there, make sure to revoke access from anyone who no longer works for you, anyone who no longer needs access, or any old accounts. Only a select few admins should have such intimate access at any given time.

Don’t Create Any New Sites

If you’re moving a major operation from one server to another, it can take several days or even weeks to migrate, test, and finalize the move. During this time, you’ll have to make some content changes to your server. If adding posts, files, or new pages is a necessary function of your company, then it needs to be done.

Just be aware that adding any new accounts or new websites during the migration is going to add complication. Wait until the migration has been completed and testing has been run first. This ensures that all the kinks are worked out from the move and that any new data will be preserved.

Server Migration Can Be Seamless

When you hire server migration professionals to handle your company’s data, you hire people who know common pitfalls to look out for. You’re less likely to lose essential data or even have your customers and clients know that you’re migrating data.

If you need help with strategic planning before or after, contact us for tips to keep your company growing during the migration.