UK IT managers steer clear of data migration
Report reveals that 39 per cent of technology chiefs admit to avoiding projects for fear of losing data
Data loss and corruption are the greatest fears for 66 per cent of UK IT managers when migrating data, according to a recent report commissioned by corporate VAR Morse.
The report, which questioned 100 IT managers in enterprises around the UK, found that fear of data loss or corruption of data was so great that 39 per cent had avoided data migration projects due to the perceived risks involved.
Wes van den Berg, storage consul-tant at Morse, said: “It’s understandable that IT managers have developed a phobia about migrating business data. However, they shouldn’t let this fear stand in the way of the advantages of new technology that could reduce the amount of time and money needed to manage business data.”
Fears of network downtime during a migration project were also found to play on many IT managers’ minds. Potential conflict between legacy and new operating systems or applications were a worry for 38 per cent of IT managers in the survey.
However, 73 per cent of those questioned admitted they would be prepared to attempt a data migration project if there was a risk-free way to migrate data to and from a vendor’s technology. This would then allow them to take advantage of new storage technology.
Andy Cordial, director of Origin Storage Solutions, said: “We’d need to see some big business advantages before we considered migration.”
However, Martin Guthrie, business unit manager at distributor InTechnology, said: “IT managers should not only weigh up the risk of migrating data, but also the risk of not migrating data as their storage hardware and software technology ages.”