Cloudhouse research has revealed that 90 per cent 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 per cent holding applications back.

Interviewing 50 senior IT decision-makers within the UK’s largest enterprises, the firm found that almost all companies (96 per cent) are still running applications on legacy Windows operating systems.

Yet with less than two months to go before the 14 January 2020 end-of-life deadline for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, 69 per cent were still hampered by the cost and complexity of migrating legacy applications.

Nearly a third (31 per cent) feared being locked into a single cloud-provider and almost a quarter (24 per cent) admitted they did not know of any solutions that would enable them to migrate their legacy applications. More than a fifth (22 per cent) were putting off the migration of business-critical applications because they did not want to risk them in a new, incompatible cloud server environment.

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

“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, chief executive at 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.”

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

More than a third (34 per cent) planned to upgrade old applications prior to migration and 16 per cent would go through recoding and refactoring.

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