Migrating data into a new system is more than an IT project — it’s a data governance challenge that affects every industry. It’s also an opportunity to reduce data costs and risks, if leveraged appropriately.
Unfortunately, under deadline pressures, teams often focus on standing up the new system, leaving the legacy system (and the data it contains) to be dealt with later. Sometimes “later” could be years down the road when memories have faded about what decisions were made during the migration process.
Copying all or part of the data duplicates data, increasing storage costs, management burden, and security attack surface. Data left behind that has not been migrated to the new system still carries cost and risk and needs governance. Orphaned data lingers in legacy systems or archives, incurring storage costs, licensing fees, system support, security exposure, and legal risk that no business line owns.
filerskeepers and Bernstein Data show how to turn migration into stronger governance: build retention and disposition into the plan from the start, use technology to analyze data at scale, and model it against a retention schedule — so you decide what to migrate, retain, archive, or defensibly delete without manual review.
Key Takeaways:
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Treat migration as a data governance opportunity
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Know your retention obligations — regulatory, legal hold, industry-specific — before deleting
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Act deliberately on what to migrate, retain, archive, or delete
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Make contemporaneous and defensible decisions on data disposition
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Avoid the trailing risks of orphaned data: fees, unstable platforms, security exposure, and technology debt
