Dive Brief:
- In a survey of 2,000 global IT executives, 44% responded that their organizations had failed at some type of IT migration, according to a new report from software provider Vision Solutions.
- Around 70% of those surveyed also said they were not prepared for downtime and additional costs that occur with migration issues.
- When systems do go down, almost half of executives said the system outages lasted longer than high-level executives expect.
Dive Insight:
Migrations take time and can have unexpected associated costs. For example, In February, Netflix said it finally completed its cloud migration after seven years. While that is a large migration, many companies are working on projects like transitioning to Windows 10 or trying to replace legacy systems.
The challenge with a major migration is that one weak point can take a whole system down, according to the survey.
"Even one imbalance in the IT system – which includes data, applications, hardware, networks, external vendor software and partners – can be the tipping point between an organization’s success and failure," said Alan Arnold, Vision Solutions executive vice president and chief technology officer, in a statement.
IT executives are also generally ill prepared for large migrations. Of those surveyed, 85% said they did not have a recovery plan or were not confident it was replaced.
