IT Struggles With Service Availability Issues

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.