Dive Brief:

• Incidences of migration failure grew 42% between 2014 and 2016, according to a new study surveying over 1,500 professionals from Vision Solutions. The largest companies, which had 1,000 employees or more, were most likely to have experienced such an event.

• The top reasons for migration failure were an inability to start applications on the new server in the required timeframe and a lack of testing that resulted in late discovery of issues.

• Although inadequate tools may have held some responsibility for the migration failures, the report found the human factor — especially employee training and planning — played a key role.

Dive Insight:

Companies migrate between platforms for a variety of reasons such as performance concerns, server consolidation and system upgrades or replacement. The key to making such a migration a success is performing it in the least disruptive way possible, and this is where the human elements of strategy, skills and training come to play. 

The downtime required during a migration can be painful and expensive for the average company and can cause many to shy away from beneficial migrations in favor of the status quo. However, with the number of companies conducting digital transformations, the status quo can hurt an organization's competitive edge.

Companies would do well to plan, test and deploy continuous uptime solutions in a unified approach that removes risk, according to Vision Solutions.