90% of UK’s FTSE 100 and 250 companies face major cloud migration problems

90% of UK enterprises in the FTSE 100 and 250 have run into major problems migrating legacy business applications to the cloud as part of their digital transformation, with 84% holding applications back, Cloudhouse research has found.

Surveying senior IT decision-makers within 50 of the UK’s largest enterprises, the research explored the challenges around cloud migration of legacy business applications.

Almost all companies (96%) are still running applications on legacy Windows operating systems. Yet with less than two months to go before the January 14, 2020 end-of-life deadline for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, 69% are still severely hampered by the cost and complexity of migrating legacy applications. Nearly a third (31%) fear being locked into a single cloud-provider and almost a quarter (24%) admit they don’t know of any solutions that would enable them to migrate their legacy applications. More than a fifth (22%) are putting off the migration of business-critical applications because they don’t want to risk them in a new, incompatible cloud server environment.

Almost six-in-ten (58%) have between a quarter and three-quarters of all their applications on legacy operating systems. Yet while 94% view application migration as important to digital transformation, only 6% have completed their digital transformation strategies and only 6% see containerisation as a solution.

“It’s very worrying that some of the largest enterprises in the UK risk being crippled by their inability to migrate legacy applications to the cloud as the Windows end-of-life deadline looms,” said Mat Clothier, CEO, Cloudhouse. “There is a gap in expertise and in their understanding of cloud-migration technology such as containerisation, which they need to overcome this paralysis.  Otherwise they face escalating costs and severely downgraded competitiveness.”

The research found that although 100% of UK enterprises surveyed want to resolve the all-too-common problems of incompatibility with legacy systems, 35% are prevented from doing so by lack of cloud market knowledge and 27% by lack of expertise.

More than a third (34%) plan to upgrade their old applications prior to migration and 16% will go through costly and complex recoding and refactoring. Some 12% will migrate to separate virtual environments such as Citrix.

“Major enterprises are neglecting the most effective and obvious solution – encapsulation,” said Clothier. “This is an advanced form of containerisation that lifts each legacy application and its underlying environment and makes it fully-functioning and evergreen in the cloud. Incompatible applications can be encapsulated and migrated without the need for refactoring, recoding, upgrading or any impact on end-user experience. This eradicates extended support charges as well as removing technical debt. It’s time for enterprises to reappraise the options.”