Introduction

Monday morning. 200 employees. Zero paychecks.

The corporate banking platform had been upgraded over the weekend, but the finance team was in chaos. Employee salaries that should have been credited were instead being debited, leaving employees staring at negative balances just days before payday. This wasn't fraud or a cyberattack—it was a critical data migration defect that went undetected during the bank's platform transition.

Proper Data Migration Validation (DMV) would have identified this issue before it impacted a single customer.

During our Data Migration Validation engagements, Go-Live Faster identified several high-risk defects that could have silently made their way into production. Although these issues were resolved before go-live, their potential impact on customer experience, operational continuity, and regulatory compliance could have been catastrophic.

Below are ten real-world migration failures that highlight why validating migrated data is just as important as migrating it.