Nearly 9 in 10 enterprises to begin the transition this year

Apr 25, 2017 11:11 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has been pushing hard for consumers to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10, and after the free upgrade promo has ended, all eyes are now on enterprises, who are also projected to begin the transition to the latest OS these days.

And according to a research conducted by analyst firm Gartner, no less than 85 percent of enterprises plan to start deployment of Windows 10 by the end of the year.

The research involved more than 1,000 decision-makers in six countries like the United States, the UK, France, China, India, and Brazil, and was conducted before September and December last year.

“Organizations recognize the need to move to Windows 10, and the total time to both evaluate and deploy Windows 10 has shortened from 23 months to 21 months between surveys that Gartner did during 2015 and 2016,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.

“Large businesses are either already engaged in Windows 10 upgrades or have delayed upgrading until 2018. This likely reflects the transition of legacy applications to Windows 10 or replacing those legacy applications before Windows 10 migration takes place.”

Security for the win

As far as the reasons for moving to Windows 10 are concerned, nearly half of the respondents (49 percent) pointed to the security of the new operating system as the main improvement driving the migration to the operating system, while cloud integration was the runner-up.

Enterprises typically wait for one or two major OS releases before beginning the deployment of a new operating system, and with the Creators Update now up for grabs, the upgrade pace is projected to accelerate towards the summer.

Furthermore, Microsoft is also projected to release the new Windows 10 Redstone 3 in September, so enterprises completing the upgrade after the fall will receive another significant upgrade for the operating system before deployment is complete.