Cutover feels like the finish line. Data moved, systems are up, the window closed on schedule.

It tells you the migration ran. It doesn’t tell you whether it worked.

I’ve watched projects look clean at cutover and fall apart during validation. Data transferred but incomplete. Permissions that appeared correct but weren’t. Applications that launched but didn’t behave the same way they did before the migration. None of it surfaced until someone went looking for it deliberately.

That’s the part most teams skip or compress. Validation isn’t confirming that systems launched. It’s checking data integrity against a pre-migration baseline, verifying access and permissions in a live environment, and watching applications under real use with real users.

Execution gets the attention. Validation determines whether what got built actually holds up.

How much of your total project time goes to validation and do you think that’s the right allocation?

#Migration #DataValidation #IT