Migration
Off the system you’re stuck on.
Onto one that fits.
Applications, infrastructure, the legacy system nobody dares switch off, and every CMS from WordPress to Joomla. However old it is and whatever it’s called, if your business runs on it, we can move it.
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Foothills Digital—Sentrello Premier Partner
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- DigitalOcean
- On-premises Linux
- On-premises Windows
Every one of our people holds active certifications on the platforms they work on.
Sentrello is our only partnership. On the clouds, it's our people who hold the certifications. We don't claim a partner tier, and we'll keep saying so until that changes.
Where this usually starts
Nobody migrates for fun
Something turned into the constraint. Usually it’s one of these, and usually more than one at a time.
- The system won’t do the one thing you need, and every answer starts with “unfortunately”.
- Add-ons hold it together. Several are abandoned, and there are two nobody dares update.
- It’s slow, and the slowness lives in code you don’t control on hosting you can’t tune.
- Your data sits in a proprietary format and the export is a PDF.
- The vendor got acquired, the roadmap stopped, and the renewal went up anyway.
- It was built for a business a third of your size. You outgrew it two years ago.
What we do instead
You pick where it lands. We move the business onto it
Maybe that’s a platform you’ve already chosen, or Strapi or Payload CMS if you’re leaving a website builder, or an application we build for you. We’ve got no destination to sell. What we care about is that the records, files, integrations and URLs all arrive, that the numbers reconcile against the old system before anyone switches, and that nothing you’ve already paid for goes missing in transit.
How it works
How the move goes
The new system runs beside the old one until it’s provably complete, and the switch is one you can reverse.
Inventory everything
Every record type, URL, form, scheduled job and integration, written down. Migrations go wrong on the things nobody remembered were there.
Get the data out, structured
Into a format that’s yours and portable. Not a dump only the old system can read.
Build the destination
On whatever you chose, with a real data model: types and fields, instead of a decade of records each shaped by whoever typed them in.
Map every redirect
Old URL to new URL, one to one, checked as a build gate rather than spot-checked afterwards. This is the step that protects the traffic you’ve already earned.
Run both, then cut over
The new system goes live beside the old one. Once it’s provably complete, traffic moves across. If anything’s wrong, it moves back.
What we move
The category matters less than whether the data can be got at. If yours isn’t listed, it’s still worth a conversation.
Applications
Custom software, line-of-business apps, the internal tool the whole office depends on. Moved to a new stack, a new host or both, with its data and integrations still attached.
Infrastructure and cloud
Between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and DigitalOcean, or between any of them and Linux or Windows servers you own. Rebuilt from definitions, not lifted across as mystery instances.
Complex legacy systems
The Access database with forty users. The thing written in-house in 2003 that still runs payroll. A lot of people hire us for exactly this kind of move.
CMS and websites
WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Joomla, and whatever an agency built you in 2014. They land on Strapi, Payload CMS or something custom, and those five platforms each get their own page.
CRM
Contacts, companies, deals, pipeline history, notes, and the attachments nobody knew were in there. Owners and dates come across as they were, not flattened to import day.
Ecommerce and shops
Catalog, variants, customers, discounts and every product URL. Plus order history, which is the part most migrations quietly drop.
ERP
Ledger, stock, purchasing, suppliers and cost centers, moved against a reconciliation. An ERP that doesn’t balance after the move hasn’t moved.
HRMS and payroll
People, contracts, leave balances, historic pay runs and documents. Effective dates matter more here than anywhere, so they arrive as dates.
PMS
Property, practice or project management: bookings, tenancies, matters, jobs, whatever the acronym means in your office. Every one of them is a schedule with money attached.
CDP and analytics
Customer profiles, identity stitching, event history and consent state. If consent doesn’t travel with the record, you haven’t migrated anything. You’ve made a compliance problem.
How old is too old?
It isn’t. Age changes the method, never the answer.
No API, no problem
No export and no API? Then the data comes straight out of the database, or off the screen if it has to. We’ve read worse formats than yours.
It has no category
Plenty of businesses run on something built in-house, or on a product nobody else has heard of. That’s a normal migration, not a strange one.
Nobody knows how it works
The person who set it up left in 2019. We work it out from the data and the behavior, which is what the inventory is for.
It’s still running the business
So it keeps running while we work. The new system gets built alongside and proven against the old one before anybody is asked to switch.
How the move goes
Inventory first
Every record type and integration, plus every report somebody quietly depends on. The forgotten things are what sink a migration.
Data out, structured
Extracted into something you own and can carry anywhere.
Reconcile before you switch
Counts and totals matched against the old system. Until that’s done, a migration is a hope rather than a result.
Redirects that keep your rankings
Where the old system was public, every old URL maps to a new one, and the build fails if one doesn’t.
Parallel, then cut over
Both systems run side by side until the new one is provably complete. You can still change your mind after the switch.
What you get on the other side
Hosting you can reason about
Defined in code and deployed from a pipeline. Lose it, and it can be rebuilt.
A real data model
Structured types and fields, instead of years of records each shaped by whoever entered them.
Your history, intact
Old records are worth something. They arrive with their dates and owners, not stamped with the day of the import.
No lock-in, again
The new arrangement is one you could walk away from. Doing this twice for the same reason would embarrass both of us.
Related
Application Development
A two-screen booking tool or the system your whole company runs on. One team from the first whiteboard to the fortieth patch, so nobody inherits code they’ve never seen.
Sentrello
Sentrello is a self-hosted, source-available unified business management platform. We’re a Sentrello Premier Partner, and our own invoices, net terms and subscriptions all come out of it.
Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)
Continuous monitoring of every laptop, desktop and server for behavior that looks like an attack, whether anyone’s seen that particular malware before or not. It’s the sensor the rest of your security runs on.
What are you trying to get off?
Tell us what it is and roughly how much is in it. That’s enough for a real answer.
We’ll tell you what the move looks like, where it’s likely to get awkward, and whether it’s worth doing this year at all.
- What we arePlan, create, launch, maintain
- What we areSentrello Premier Partner
- What we areEvery quote written for you