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What does a data migration analyst do? What skills are required? How can a DM Analyst help your migration project?
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A successful data migration depends on more than just moving data from one system to another. Behind every reliable migration project is one or more data migration analysts, a specialist responsible for understanding data structures, data mapping, validating accuracy, reconciliation and ensuring business requirements are met.
For organisations modernising platforms, moving to the cloud, or migrating data to new applications, the data migration analyst plays a critical role in protecting data quality and ensuring project success.
In this guide, we explain what a data migration analyst does, their responsibilities, required skills, and how they support scalable data transformation.
A data migration analyst is responsible for analysing, mapping, validating, and reconciling data during migration projects. They work closely with business stakeholders, data engineers, and migration leads to ensure data is transferred accurately and meets business requirements.
Their role sits at the intersection of technical execution and business understanding.
Without proper analysis and validation, migrations can result in incorrect data, broken reporting, and operational disruption.
A data migration analyst helps organisations:
Their work ensures data quality and consistency after migration.
The responsibilities of a data migration analyst span planning, execution, and validation.
Data migration analysts review source systems to understand:
This analysis helps identify potential risks early. The sooner issues can be found in the source, the sooner they can be corrected. You do not want to be migrating bad data.
Migration analysts assist with creating accurate mapping documentation.
This includes:
Accurate mapping prevents data mismatches. There is nothing worse than finding out your data has been truncated because it will not fit in the destination system.
Before migration, analysts help prepare data by:
Clean data improves migration success as it reduces the risk of migrating mismatching data. Nothing worse than values not totalling up correctly during reconciliation.
After migration, analysts verify accuracy.
Validation tasks include:
Reconciliation ensures trust in migrated data. You should be able to run reports in both the source and destination systems and have them total correctly. The reconciliation will provide that feedback.
Data migration analysts act as a bridge between technical teams and business users.
They support:
Collaboration improves outcomes. Data analysts are in constant discussion with subject matter experts as they understand the data. Just lifting and shifting data is not enough to ensure the data is modelled correctly.
Clear documentation is essential.
Analysts create:
Documentation supports governance. If you can track it, you can see how far you have gone and how far you have left to go. You can also estimate how long entities or cycles will take to run.
When problems arise, analysts help diagnose root causes.
They assist with:
Early resolution prevents delays and ensures a smoother ride all the way to cut over.
When is complete actually complete?
Cut over is the point where you run the migration all the way through from start to finish and cease using the source system and start using the destination system as a production system. After everything has been migrated, reconciled, tested and verified, it is time to get final sign off from the stakeholders. Once signed off a period of care is usually provided to make sure everything is as it should be and any issues are corrected in the production system.
Successful analysts combine technical and analytical skills.
Key skills include:
Strong skills in analysis can improve project delivery as well as attention to detail. It also helps to have some sort of domain experience with the data e.g. financial ,CRM, HR data sets.
Automation depends on consistent, high-quality data.
Migration analysts support automation by:
They ensure automation reliability.
Migration analysts often encounter challenges such as:
Strong planning helps manage these challenges as well as having experienced experts with historical knowledge and understanding of the data.
Organisations with dedicated migration analysts benefit from:
The role delivers measurable value during data migration projects and can prevent spiralling costs and delays. Data migration projects are a specialised task and should not be left to just anyone. We frequently see projects that have been started and abandoned or have experienced multi year delays due to issues caused by data issues. It is not just a matter of extracting it and inserting it into the destination system. Without the correct methodology being used, you will find project success will be elusive.
Data migration analysts often progress into roles such as:
The role builds a strong technical and analytic foundation with cross functional skills across multiple functional domains.
A data migration analyst plays a vital role in ensuring migration success by ensuring data rules are applied, reconciliation is completed accurately and sign off is achieved. By bridging business requirements and technical execution, they help organisations modernise platforms with confidence.
With strong analysis processes, automation tools, and governance frameworks in place, data migration analysts transform complex projects into reliable digital transformation initiatives.
Their expertise ensures a successful data migration.
Ryan has always been passionate about data, technology, and their potential to transform business performance. With over 20 years of experience in marketing and technology, he specialises in delivering innovative solutions that help organisations thrive in a competitive landscape. The hands on marketing domain knowledge helps to convey the power of the numbers and how they show what is really happening in your business.
