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Data migration continues to be a key operational function that organizations must master to leverage the full benefits of hybrid and multicloud environments. Security and potential data loss continue to be major concerns associated with data migration, driving a larger percentage of respondents to enlist service providers and system integrators to help manage their migrations. The migration of data between public cloud providers and data repatriation, which moves data from public cloud to storage at company-owned or collocated datacenters, are also becoming more common. Our study, conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, focused on data migration and was conducted between May and June of 2025.
The Take
The growing challenges associated with data migration have forced organizations to reevaluate their processes and procedures for running this sensitive operation. With most respondents now having experience moving large payloads (1 PB and larger) between on-premises, collocation and public cloud environments, a growing portion of organizations are now concerned with the large amounts of time required to migrate large data repositories.
As migrations have grown in scale and complexity, concerns related to unplanned downtime and security vulnerabilities have intensified. In response, more organizations are looking to leverage service providers and system integrators to manage their data migrations. Likewise, the use of physical transports as an alternative to network-based migrations has also risen, which can accelerate the migration of large-scale data — especially if the source sites do not have adequate network bandwidth to move petabyte scale payloads.
Summary of findings
Data repatriation and migrations between public clouds are becoming more common. Data migration between public cloud storage providers is now extremely common, with 78% moving data between public clouds in the last 12 months, which is up significantly from 40% in 2024. Data repatriation also continues to be common, with 41% of respondents saying they repatriated data from a public cloud provider to a company-owned datacenter or colocation provider within the past year, which was similar to our 2024 findings (40% performing repatriation).
Complaints of long migrations rise as payloads grow. About 70% of respondents say their organization has had experience migrating more than 1 PB of data between environments, which is up significantly compared with the 40% of respondents who migrated big payloads in 2024. With these large migrations, it is not surprising that the percentage of customers who strongly agree that migrations take too long increased from 20% of respondents in 2024 to 30% in 2025.
Cloud Maturity Brings Organizational IT Change
Migrations create security and data loss concerns. About 36% of respondents strongly agree that data migrations lead to concerns related to security threats and vulnerabilities, up from 31% in 2024. About 25% of respondents say extended unplanned downtime came because of a data migration, up from 13% in 2024.
Service providers and system integrators are managing more data migrations between on-premises and public cloud. In-house staff still runs 48% of migrations, though that figure is down from 65% in 2024. Migrations managed by service providers and system integrators increased from 24% in 2024 to 46% of the respondents in this survey. Given the rising security and data loss concerns related to migrations, we expect that more organizations will look to use third parties to guide their migrations to a safe completion.
Egress charges become problematic for even more organizations. The percentage of respondents who say their organization has been impacted by egress charges is up from 53% in 2024 to 72%. Egress charges are driving 45% of respondents to move data to new service providers with fewer charges, and for 39%, they have prevented implementation of a multicloud architecture.
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