After you have retired an application on a non-production environment, typically you would repeat the entire process, including application retirement, data validation, report creation, compliance, and sign-off, on the target (production) environment. If you have completed the entire process on a pre-production environment and the retired data is identical to what you must retire again on the production instance, the application migration process prevents you from having to repeat the entire process. Instead, you can migrate the relevant data from pre-production onto the production instance.

This saves time and effort as opposed to duplicating the pre-production work, as long as you have retired the entire application in the source instance. During the migration process, relevant application data and metadata is directly migrated from the source to target environment.

Before you begin the application migration process, note the following requirements:

The application version/product family version that you want to migrate does not already exist in the target Data Archive and Data Vault environments.
The archive folder does not exist in the target Data Vault environment.
The source and target environments must be on the same operating system.
Both the source and target environments must have the same versions of Data Vault and Data Archive.
The staging directory and data directory in the target Data Vault connection must be accessible (both read and write permissions) to both the target Data Vault and Data Archive systems.

Note the following limitations in the pre-production to production data migration process:

You cannot view job steps in the production environment because the process does not migrate job step information.
You cannot view the Integration Report of migrated jobs in the production environment.
The process does not migrate job step logs to the production environment.
You must enter passwords of migrated source and target connections in the production environment.
You cannot migrate multiple application versions from a single Archive folder into Data Vault.
You must not include whitespace characters in the export file directory name.