IT Survey: Mission-Critical Outages Too Common

Organizations are falling short of their service availability goals, according to the results of Continuity Software’s third annual Service Availability Benchmark Survey.

Continuity Software, provider of service availability risk management solutions, provides the survey for IT infrastructure, business continuity and disaster recovery professionals to compare their organization’s performance and practice with their peers.

This year’s report, based on the responses from more than 155 professionals, found that 59 percent of companies had an outage in the past three months and 28 percent had an outage in the past month. Meanwhile, 41 percent of the surveyed organizations missed their service availability goal for mission-critical systems in 2013.

Additional findings of the survey included:

•    About two-thirds (66 percent) of the respondents have initiatives for improving service availability management in 2014

•    Proactive identification of risks is the top challenge 20 percent of respondents report facing in ensuring service availability

•    With 72 percent of respondents using it, the most common and effective strategy for ensuring service availability is virtualization HA, up from 63 percent of respondents in 2013

"It is discouraging to see that such a high percentage of organizations continue to miss their service availability goals, despite the tremendous effort and investment made across the infrastructure," stated Doron Pinhas, chief technology officer of Continuity Software.  "IT teams are finding themselves in a never-ending chase to keep up with the pace of change across the IT landscape. As the survey results show, IT organizations are increasingly recognizing that a proactive approach to risk identification is more effective for outage prevention than playing catchup." 

The full report is available here.

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