More than three-quarters (79 per cent) of UK businesses find data migration projects inconvenient and disruptive to the business, as they impact core IT systems.
This is the finding among retail, distribution and transport sectors questioned by researcher Vanson Bourne, while the average number of respondents that felt it was difficult to stop IT operations which are in constant use to perform a data migration across all sectors was only slightly lower, at 72 per cent.
The best performing sector was financial services which, with 58 per cent finding data migration impacts core IT systems, suggesting such organisations tend to have highly redundant systems and so, can take one system down to carry out the data migration with minimum disruption, while the other continues to serve the organisation.
Data management vendor and the survey sponsor, Kognitio said financial services companies could also have come out best in its poll because understand the importance of rationalising their computing environment and are prepared to balance the benefits of undertaking a data migration or platform rationalisation project against any potential disruption to their business by halting their IT operations.
It also said retail, distribution and transport sectors lag behind financial services firms because the nature of these businesses, which often operate online shopping facilities and web-based tracking systems, which are both applications that need to be running without any interruption in most cases.
The survey also found 76 per cent of those respondents from the manufacturing industry, halting the IT operations was a particular challenge. Kognitio said this is because nowadays such organisations tend to be heavily automated, operating around the clock with a high dependency on IT systems and networks.
Tim Tresadern, IT manager for insurer, Allianz Cornhill Schemes said having a specialist data migration partner removes the perceived risk of such migration projects as suggested by the survey findings. "The Kognitio team was instrumental in providing us with the tools, knowledge and peace of mind that allowed us to carry out an entire data migration process smoothly, quickly and successfully."
