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Nearly three-fourths of businesses (71 percent) said their companies plan to wait at least six months after the Windows 10 release to migrate to the new OS. Just under half (49 percent) said they plan to wait a year or more, according to a survey of 186 technology professionals conducted by Adaptiva.
The vast majority of respondents are running Windows 7 (89 percent) and/or Windows 8 (57 percent). Of those survey takers at large organizations with more than 10,000 nodes, 99 percent are running Configuration Manager in their enterprise, and 62 percent plan to use it to deploy Windows 10.
Microsoft’s no-cost upgrade will be available for one year only following Windows 10’s official release.
To move to the new OS, nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of large organizations plan to utilize side-by-side replacements–deploying new computers with Windows 10. Another 36 percent plan to perform in-place upgrades.
“Larger organizations often replace computers on a cycle and strategically time those replacements to coincide with an OS migration,” Deepak Kumar, chief technology officer and founder of Adaptiva, told eWEEK. “This saves them work of completing a full migration and then having to upgrade to a new OS later down the road. Windows 10 has the same hardware requirements as Windows 7, so no new hardware is required. Windows 10 does offer touch screen support, which is new for people moving from Windows 7, and some companies may be looking to leverage that capability.”
The survey also found most companies plan to use zero-touch and light-touch strategies to migrate to Windows 10 (60 percent).
“These two strategies allow companies to automate high-volume deployments,” Kumar said. “In a larger business, with thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of machines, manual deployment is far too slow and expensive. By employing a zero- or light-touch strategy, organizations streamline deployment by fully automating the process, and requiring little or no administrator interaction.”
The results indicated the biggest obstacles holding respondents back from migrating to Windows 10 quickly are application compatibility and time investment (98 percent), followed by user training (35 percent), and product maturity (23 percent).
The majority (54 percent) said the cloud has no impact on their ability to upgrade and patch applications or migrate operating systems. However, 40 percent said the cloud is actually making it harder for them to perform these basic systems management tasks, up from 7 percent in 2014.
Just 11 percent only of all respondents’ organizations are still running Windows XP, down from 53 percent survey respondents last year.