Strategic Risk Management for Database Migration: A Comprehensive Approach

Risk Strategy Planning

Risks can either be handled or avoided (Islam, 2017). Strategizing for risk mitigation is a necessary step in any business move that will impact the normal flow. A risk mitigation plan is designed to ensure preparation for threats that might occur. During the planning phase, the strategy determines the risk, makes an assessment, and prioritizes it based on its probability and level of threat. This ensures readiness in case it occurs and diversion before it happens, minimizing the likelihood of its occurrence and its impact on the organization.

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Process and Review of Risks

A risk analyst is an expert in the company that summarizes the risk the process faces. Together with the concerned team or department is mandated to shortlist identified risks, make precise cut assessments, and derive conclusions on the risk’s priority and the mitigation efforts that will be put into it. This should be done regularly, to ensure not only surety but also ensure correct prioritization.

Roles of Risk Management

The team involved in risk management will have the following duties and responsibilities (Islam, 2017):

• Designing the overall risk management and strategic plan for the organization.
• Creating risk awareness among staff to ensure it is avoided.
• Provide training to concerned parties on how to avoid the risks in respective domains.
• Performing risk evaluation and assessment of the process.
• Performing policy and compliance audits regularly.

Recommendation Tailored for this Scenario

The time disparity between the creation of the two SQL servers is close to a decade. This is needless to say many changes have happened in database construction since then. Thus, risks are higher on security and deprecation of data values. Risk management in this migration will be based on three key elements:

Outsider involvement. If the use of an outsider will be needed, then access privileges and what he/she is allowed to view and understand should be limited. Close monitoring and pre-training of the outsider is a minimum requirement to ensure no misconfigurations are realized.

Staff Expertise. Clearly, after using SQL Server 2008, the company staff are not conversant with the new structure and features of SQL Server 2016. For this migration to work, then staff should re-undergo training on the new database and how to store and retrieve information from it. This will minimize the risk of them messing up.

Rollback Strategy. Suppose the migration fails due to known or unknown reasons. Then the risk management should have prepared a clear backtracking plan. This will ensure business downtime is minimized, and a second try of the migration can be done.

References

Abdul Rahman, A. A. L., Islam, S., Kalloniatis, C., & Gritzalis, S. (2017). A risk management

approach for a sustainable cloud migration. Journal of Risk and Financial

Management, 10(4), 20. https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/10/4/20

Islam, S., Fenz, S., Weippl, E., & Mouratidis, H. (2017). A risk management framework for cloud migration decision support. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 10(2), 10. https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/10/2/10/htm