Moving consolidated data to the live production environment

A consolidation project culminates with merging one or more customers into a live production environment. The final stages of this process typically take place over the cutover weekend with an outage in the source and target systems. A cutover typically includes the following operations:

• Prevent changes to the source production system data, typically achieved by shutting down the system
• Migrate all in-scope data from the source production system into the target production system
• Validate success (typically multiple validation checkpoints)
• Redirect integrations from the source to the target production system
• Redirect user traffic from the source to the target production system
• Prevent data changes to the in-scope data in the source system
• Shut down of the source system or removal of customers from the source system

This process shares much in common with the cutover performed as part of the typical parallel environment upgrade process.