Impact

Overview

NARAs legacy PERL platform provided storage for the historical records of presidential administrations. NARA needed to migrate PERL to their modernized EOP system located on their AWS GovCloud platform. This mission-critical transfer needed to be zero-loss and maintain the integrity of all important historical documents in the PERL.

Challenge

As NARA enhanced its mission-critical systems and migrated them to the cloud, the agency needed to have PERL’s born-digital records transferred to the Executive Office of the President (EOP) Cloud System. PERL datasets are historical records that could not be altered in any way. The functions and underlying data needed to remain unchanged following data migration. The transfer needed to occur with zero gaps in data integrity, feature functionality, and search performance. And, it had to be delivered in a verifiable, auditable, and entirely secure way.

Solution

Softek identified and inventoried all archival content, business objects, and metadata from each administration’s PERL to:

1. Create a baseline inventory to verify migration completeness, and to
2. Identify unique data types for JSON document Submission Information Package (SIP) mappings.

Following transfer to the AWS GovCould, Softek confirmed the inventory’s data integrity and transformed it to SIP mappings. The transformation process, performed with ETLs (Extract, Transform, and Load), included automated validations and logs to ensure the transformed data complied with SIP specifications.

Once valid SIPs were created, Softek programmatically validated SIP content completeness by checking that every source element existed in a target location. This approach ensured an accurate and complete transformation of record content into the SIP structure, permitting data ingestion into the EOP.

Using multiple stage gates, we validated, mitigated any issues, and securely migrated each data element to the EOP system.

Results