As much as 85% of businesses will have migrated to Windows 10 before the year ends. Security improvements drive the move.
Eighty-five percent of enterprises will have started Windows 10 deployments by the end of 2017, with nearly two-thirds of organizations completing their Windows migration in less than a year. That’s the main takeaway from a new report from Gartner.
Gartner surveyed firms in six countries (the U.S., the U.K., France, China, India and Brazil) between September and December of 2016, and they spoke to 1,014 respondents who were involved in decisions for Windows 10 migration.
The time to evaluate and deploy Windows 10 dipped slightly, from 23 months for previous operating systems to 21 months for Windows 10. Large businesses that are yet to start the migration are delaying because of legacy applications, a typical problem with every OS version. They are delaying upgrading until 2018, according to Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.
When asked what drives their migration to Windows 10, 49 percent of respondents said security improvements were the main reason for the migration, followed by cloud integration capabilities (38 percent). The appeal of new devices also helped.
“Respondents’ device buying intentions have significantly increased as organizations saw third- and fourth-generation products optimized for Windows 10 with longer battery life, touchscreens and other Windows 10 features. The intention to purchase convertible notebooks increased as organizations shifted from the testing and pilot phases into the buying and deployment phases,” said Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement.
Microsoft had a fast rollout for Windows 10 before things leveled off. Worldwide, Windows 10 is sitting at about 400 million units, short of the 1 billion devices Microsoft aspired to reach within two years of launch.
