Critical operations threatened by application incompatibility

Over three quarters (77%) of organisations have at least one application that is not compatible with the latest version of Windows, with up to a quarter (25%) of all applications incompatible for 89% of organisations. This is according to new research of UK and US CIOs commissioned by Cloudhouse, the application compatibility packaging and configuration management solutions provider.

Despite these findings, almost a third of businesses (32%) reported that between 16-25% of their applications are critical to their business operations, while 36% cited modernisation as an urgent priority. Ensuring application compatibility is therefore pivotal, but organisations are also hesitant to initiate such projects, with almost a quarter (24%) of organisations either not at all or not very confident in their ability to fully upgrade these platforms to be 100% compatible with the latest version of the Windows operating system.

This lack of confidence among CIOs may stem from the fact that half of all businesses (50%) feel that there is a significant amount of work to still be done to modernise applications for compatibility with newer Windows versions. Additionally, 25% believe that they’ve now ironed out most issues, but there is still some work to be done to ensure modernisation. Only one in five (20%) have a comprehensive plan in place.

“Our research has discovered that application compatibility is, unfortunately, a common occurrence among businesses, and if left unchecked can impact the platforms that are absolutely critical to operations. It’s vital for these organisations to make use of specialist tools that allow applications to be transplanted to new Windows operating systems, without losing any functionality or impact on the user experience,” Mat Clothier, CEO and Founder of Cloudhouse.

Of businesses with a plan of action, almost one in three (29%) have a primary strategy to replace their application to ensure compatibility with a new Windows version, but this is typically costly, time-consuming and may require additional training for employees to use an unfamiliar platform.

Across other findings, in the area of internal websites, respondents identified almost half (49%) of incompatible applications as desktop versions, creating a negative impact on the user experience. Despite these findings creating a cause for concern, 55% of organisations plan to increase their 2022 budget for application modernisation by more than a quarter (26% or above), with 17% planning to increase it by more than 50%, revealing a clear intent to improve compatibility.