IT Struggles With Service Availability Issues
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A Failure to Plan …
90% of professionals said service availability is "highly critical" to customers, but 32% said their organization doesn't have a formal service availability commitment to customers. -
… Is Planning for Failure
41% said their organization missed its service availability goal for mission-critical systems in 2013. -
Mission Migration
75% of professionals surveyed said their company runs some mission-critical apps in a private cloud, while 47% run some of these apps in a public cloud. -
Lost in the Cloud
30% said their cloud application service availability readiness is not on par with the rest of their systems, and 39% said they never test their private cloud availability. -
Top Service Availability Challenges
Proactive identification of risks: 20%, Change management: 14%, Lack of resources for testing: 14%, Cross-domain/cross-team coordination: 14%, Inadequate infrastructure documentation: 10% -
Low Bar
42% said their organization is committed to less than eight hours of unplanned downtime a year, but only 13% have committed to the highest level: less than an hour a year. -
Shutdown Mode
59% said their company has had an outage in the last three months, and 28% had one in the last month. -
Motivators for Service Availability
Ensuring customer satisfaction: 43%, Avoiding productivity loss: 35%, Protecting company reputation: 10%, Complying with regulations: 10% -
Strategies/Tools to Support Service Availability
Virtualization High Availability: 72%, Restore availability from backup: 71%, Replication to a disaster recovery site: 70% -
In-House Job
Only 18% of surveyed enterprises are strategically outsourcing service availability, a.k.a. "disaster recovery as a service." That's down from 26% in 2013.
A significant number of organizations are falling short of their service availability goals for mission-critical systems, according to the "2014 Service Availability Benchmark Survey" from Continuity Software. It isn't helping that many companies don't even formally commit to making such services available for their customers. Unfortunately, findings reveal that the burden is falling on the IT department. Why? Because service outages are most commonly traced to hardware failures (cited by 55 percent of survey respondents), system upgrades and migrations (51 percent), and human error (47 percent). Companies are also facing challenges ensuring service availability for apps that are run in the cloud. A surprising number aren't even testing their cloud-based service availability. The consequences of these outages are severe: More than two out of five professionals said that every hour of downtime costs their organization $100,000 or more, and 12 percent said an hour of downtime costs more than $1 million. "It likely comes as no great surprise that ensuring customer satisfaction is the most common business driver for service availability," said Doron Pinhas, CTO of Continuity Software. "Maintaining uninterrupted access to services typically equates to business success, as well as individual career survival. However, what is surprising is that such a high percentage of business organizations continue to miss their service availability goals, regardless of the tremendous effort and investment they are making across that infrastructure." A total of 155 professionals from a wide range of industries took part in the research.