February 27, 2014 - Insurance software provider Transactor Global Solutions Ltd (TGSL) is keen to dispel the myth that moving data from one proprietary broking platform to another more modern one is a major challenge.

Alex Williams, Head of Sales, TGSL, said, "We understand why our competitors exaggerate the difficulties of a data migration from their system to another platform. A client changing platforms represents the end of a decent maintenance and transactional income stream for the software provider so they are hardly likely to encourage it. We have heard of suppliers telling their clients that a data migration to a competitor is impossible. We have even heard of one supplier which doesn't offer a data migration from an older version of their own software to a newer version. We want businesses to understand their options, and know that moving data from one system to another is an everyday event in the modern IT world."

Danny Kingston, Chief Technology Officer, TGSL, said, "Data migration can either mean the process of translating data from one format to another or the process of moving data from one storage device to another. Moving an insurance enterprise from one system to another involves both, but it is an increasingly common event in our industry, and managed properly presents more opportunities than threats to a business making the jump."

"Businesses that have traded on a legacy system for a number of years have often accumulated quite a lot of clutter. A data migration can offer the opportunity to have a monumental tidy up, producing benefits across the board, especially in policy administration and accounts. From a business efficiency perspective, a decent data migration should be a positive experience."

Over the last two years TGSL has managed dozens of data migrations for businesses moving from older platforms to Transactor, and as a result the process has become extremely effective and efficient. The work usually involves moving data from a flat file proprietary data format to Transactor's modern Microsoft SQL Server relational database. The older systems deal with data in a rigidly structured manner, so getting the data out and mapped across is the same for every instance. This makes the process very repeatable and incrementally safer the more times it is completed.

Williams concluded, "We appreciate the value of the data, and treat it with the respect it deserves. We have a fixed cost, the process itself is carried out as a project within a project, and we have specialists involved at every phase of the process to make sure we are 100% successful in every case."