The 2017 State of Resilience Report by Vision Solutions shared some interesting insights into trends and issues in migration over the past year. The report’s findings were based on a survey of more than 400 IT professionals.

Migration Goals Vary

The top three migration goals, according to respondents, were to replace outdated server hardware, improve performance and upgrade storage hardware.

Surprisingly, adopting a cloud platform fell in the lower half of responses, at around 20 percent, compared to 56 percent for the top objective. These were IT-focused goals, but the report also noted that business requirements helped to shape overall migration objectives.

Resource Requirements Stretch Internal Staff

Migration requires a range of skills and can be a time-consuming drain on internal resources. Almost half of respondents reported that they used only internal resources, while more than 40 percent hired external specialists to work with internal staff.

With almost 90 percent of respondents utilizing internal staff in some way to support migration, it’s clear that efficiency is essential to avoid disruption or delay to other operational and strategic tasks.

Migration Failures Increasing

One worrying statistic that came out of the report was the rise in migration failures, up from 36 percent in 2014 to 51 percent in 2016. Larger organizations with more than 1000 employees suffered more failures than their smaller counterparts – 60 percent compared to 44 percent.

Migrations are complex and require high levels of skills and resources at every stage from planning, through discovery, testing, migration and project management. The report found that the two main reasons cited for failure were inability to launch applications in the new environment within a planned timeframe and late discovery of problems because of lack of testing.

Looking at the migration process, it’s essential to set realistic goals and timeframes, and to provide sufficient time and resources to carry out careful planning and comprehensive testing. Adequate skills are also vital.

Downtime Tops Migration Challenges

More than 40 percent of respondents reported that system downtime and staff overtime were the main challenges during migration, with 66 percent commenting that concerns about downtime had led them to postpone migration projects.

Downtime doesn’t just affect the IT team. When systems are not available, employee productivity and customer experience are also impacted.  However, postponing a migration can also impact those factors because organizations may continue to struggle with poor performance from outdated infrastructure and operational inefficiency.

Although many factors influence the cost of downtime for individual organizations, the report estimated that an average cost for each hour of downtime was around $10,000, an increase of some 5 percent over the previous year.

Time for a Different Approach?

VTG believes that migration is too important to risk failure. A successful migration can improve business competiveness and operational efficiency, while reducing costs.

The emphasis should be on reducing downtime and risk of error by working in partnership with experienced migration professionals and automating critical processes such as planning, discovery and project management.

VTG’s migration team utilize ZENfra™, a patented automation tool that can manage and monitor migration projects to cut lead times by 30 to 40 percent and reduce costs by 25 percent compared to traditional in-house methods.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about ZENfra™ or our migration services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.