Organizations that are successful in their use of GIS across the enterprise continuously modernize to take advantage of new capabilities and maximize their technology investments to support business objectives. This modernization often requires migrating users, groups, and content from one GIS system to another. Successful and efficient migrations are achievable by leveraging a thoughtful approach to the planning and execution of migration activities. Migration strategies vary, depending on the size and goals of organizations, but the benefits are clear—better performance, lower costs, updated capabilities, and compliant security.

Why migrate?

  • Performance

    Aging infrastructure can prevent you from reaching your potential. Many organizations lose peak performance and rack up server administration costs when server infrastructure is not upgraded in a timely fashion, usually within five years.

  • Cost

    Using older hardware and software versions not only might lead to performance drops but also higher opportunity costs. These costs can lead to loss of productivity and reliability and increased maintenance costs.

  • Capabilities

    Moving to new infrastructure—particularly the cloud—can provide numerous technical advantages, including elastic scalability, flexible server capacity, persistent storage, and cloud native databases.

  • Security and compliance

    Organizations are increasingly instituting new standards in security and governance that take advantage of systems with firewalls, virtual private clouds, and active governance.

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How we approach migration

Understand

Prepare the groundwork for your migration. Identify your organization's business objectives to justify migrating your GIS to achieve these goals.

Plan

Develop and document your migration strategy. An effective plan aligns technology to business needs and considers people, process, and technology.

Act

Prepare, implement, operate, and review migration activities, such as multiple scales of migration, based on your strategy.

Most common migration patterns

Migration can take various forms based on your unique situation and chosen strategy.

Rehost

Small-scale "lift-and-shift" effort

Same source and target architecture

Moving content as is

Same software version or straightforward upgrade path

Refactor

Medium-scale effort with limited modernization

Changes to content publication strategy

Leverage cloud native capabilities

Minor networking changes

Small-scale content cleanup

Rearchitect

Large-scale effort with architecture changes

Significant content cleanup

Adding additional server roles

Architecture reenvisioning

Rebuild

Leveraging new, transformational GIS patterns

Moving into on-premises from pure software as a service (SaaS)

Transitioning from server GIS to Web GIS

Adopting microservices and containerization

Find out more about migration

If you'd like to learn more about enterprise migration, please fill out the form below to receive our migration guide.