Every migration has an cutover window – a period of time where the systems are offline or in transition. It’s normal and manageable.

What organizations really fear is unplanned outages: the cutover which runs three hours beyond the window, a rollback that no one has practiced and the dependency, which was not detected, that took the application offline the morning after the go-live.

These scenarios can occur when the cutover was not tested, rollbacks were not documented and the Hyper Care period was unstaffed.

A well-structured, planned migration with a generous cutover period is almost always less disruptive that a compressed migration which tries to minimize downtime but doesn’t account for what will happen when things don’t go as planned.

Planned downtimes are a hallmark of a successful migration. Unplanned downtime occurs when you skip the work to prevent it.

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