Cloudhouse: 92% of Major US Enterprises Hit Serious Cloud Migration Problems

More than nine out of 10 of US enterprises in the Dow Jones, Fortune 250 and 500, and S&P 100 have run into major problems migrating legacy business applications to the cloud, with over three quarters holding applications back, Cloudhouse research has found.

Surveying senior IT decision-makers at 51 US enterprises, the research explored the challenges around cloud migration of legacy business applications.

The study found that 94% of enterprises run applications on legacy operating systems, while 65% identify cost and complexity as factors severely hampering migration plans. Nearly half (48%) fear being locked into a single cloud provider, while 43% hold back from migration because they fear it will put business-critical legacy applications at risk.

While every respondent bar two viewed application migration as important to digital transformation, only 10% have actually completed their digital transformation strategies and just 8% see containerisation as a solution to the incompatibility between legacy applications and cloud systems.

“It’s very worrying that as the Windows end of life deadline looms on January 14, even the largest enterprises in the US seem increasingly paralysed about migrating legacy applications to the cloud,” said Mat Clothier, CEO, Cloudhouse. “Unless they gain access to expertise and real understanding of cloud-migration technology, such as application compatibility packaging, they face escalating costs and severely impaired competitiveness.”

Almost half of enterprises say they are hampered by lack of cloud market knowledge while 38% are holding back applications purely because of cost. Nearly a third (31%) lack expertise in migration.

“Major enterprises are neglecting the most effective and obvious solution to the significant problems of migrating legacy applications to the cloud – application compatibility packaging,” said Clothier. “Incompatible applications can be packaged and migrated without the need to refactor, recode, upgrade and with no impact on the end-user experience. This eradicates extended support charges and keeps applications evergreen.”