Every business runs on data. Customer records, transactions, inventory, history — strip the data away and what remains is infrastructure with nothing to protect and software with nothing to process. Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and the database is its sanctuary. We treat physical infrastructure like a fort firewalls, perimeter security, access controls. But the database sitting at the center of that fort? In many organizations it is still on-premises, on aging hardware, managed by processes built in a different era of computing. And eventually every organization faces the same decision: migrate. Database migration to the cloud is not a lift-and-shift operation. It is not an export-and-import exercise. It is a surgical operation performed on a living, breathing system that cannot go offline. The patient your database must remain conscious throughout the procedure. Get it wrong and you are not just looking at downtime.…