Someone else chose your deadline. The records still have to survive it.
A vendor sunsets a product, gets acquired, or ends support for the version you run. You now have a date, and a migration nobody planned or budgeted for.
The part that gets underestimated is not moving the features. It is moving the history. Years of records, attachments, audit trails and identifiers have to arrive intact and still reconcile with what they said before — especially anything you might have to defend to an auditor, a regulator or a counterparty later.
Before you hire anyone, including us.
These are in order, and none of them cost anything. Working through them will also tell you how serious your situation actually is.
- 01
Read what the vendor will actually give you, in writing.
Export format, how far back, whether attachments come with it, and precisely when access ends. "You can export your data" is not an answer until you have seen a sample and its schema.
- 02
Take a full export now, while access is normal.
Do not wait for the migration plan. Export early, export again later, and keep both. Exports taken close to a shutdown date are frequently degraded or rate-limited.
- 03
Decide what must reconcile, not just what must transfer.
Pick the handful of numbers someone outside your company could ask you to prove — balances, totals, dates, chains of custody. Those define whether the migration succeeded, far better than a feature checklist.
- 04
Identify what you will lose and decide about it deliberately.
Some things never come across cleanly. Knowing which, and choosing to accept it in advance, is a completely different position from discovering it afterwards.
- 05
Do not let the deadline pick your replacement.
Forced timelines produce the migration that was easiest to sell, not the one that fits. A short scoping exercise up front usually buys back more time than it costs.
Four questions that settle it.
- What is the actual end-of-access date, from the vendor in writing?
- Have you successfully taken and opened a full export, including attachments?
- Which numbers would you have to be able to prove after the move?
- Is there any regulatory or contractual retention requirement attached to this data?
This trigger overlaps our main practice: a migration whose records have to stay defensible is exactly the work we do outside of rescue. A diagnostic scopes the move and tells you what reconciles, what does not, and what the honest cost is — before a vendor's date makes the decision for you.
If you want someone to read it properly.
A paid diagnostic is from $750, two to five days, scoped on a short call before you pay anything. You get what is actually there, what is wrong, what it costs to fix, and a plan you keep — with us or with anyone else.