Almost all businesses will be moving to Windows 10 by end of the year

The vast majority of all companies will have begun migrating to Windows 10 across their workforce by the end of 2017, according to new research.

This comes from a Gartner survey conducted at the end of last year across six countries (including the UK and US), which found that 85% of businesses will have begun deploying Windows 10 in this timeframe.

46% had already begun the move (or completed migration) as of the end of last year, incidentally. At the other end of the spectrum where the hardcore holdouts reside, only 3% said they would never upgrade to Windows 10 (presumably from Windows XP, ahem), and 2% said they’d move come 2020 or later.

Security blanket

The poll, which questioned over a thousand staff who were involved in the decision-making to migrate to the newest version of Windows, found that the most common reason cited for upgrading – in 49% of cases – was better security.

Cloud integration capabilities came in second place with 38% of respondents valuing this as a reason to make the move to Windows 10. That was closely followed by universal apps, with 34% of those surveyed liking the idea of having software that works across phones, tablets and PCs.

And just behind that, 33% said they were being driven to the new operating system simply by the fact that Windows 7 support reaches end-of-life in 2020.

Gartner did, however, find that there were concerns around budgeting for the deployment of Windows 10.

Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, noted: “Windows 10 is not perceived as an immediate business-critical project; it is not surprising that one in four respondents expect issues with budgeting.”

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).