Downtime
Downtime Events
59% of companies experienced an outage in the past three months while 28% had an outage in the past month.
Outage Causes
Hardware failure is the biggest reason for outages, said 55% of respondents. Other causes were upgrades and migration (51%), human error (47%), application error (43%) and power outages (39%).
Customer Satisfaction
43% of respondents said ensuring customer satisfaction is the most common driver for service availability while 35% said avoiding productivity loss is the second most common.
Critical Factor
90% of respondents said service availability is highly critical to their customers. However, 32% of companies do not have a formal service availability commitment to customers.
Commitments
42% of companies have a commitment of less than eight hours of unplanned downtime annually while 13% commit to less than one hour annually.
Mission Critical
73% of companies have a service availability goal of more than 99.91% (less than eight hours of unplanned downtime for the year) in 2014, compared with 68% in 2013.
Missed Goals
41% of organizations said they missed their service availability goal for mission-critical systems in 2013. Companies with the highest service availability goals in place were less successful at meeting them.
Meeting Goals
66% of those polled have initiatives in place to improve service availability management in 2014.
Price of Outages
43% of respondents said every hour of downtime costs $100,000 or more. For 12% of companies, the cost is more than $1 million per hour of downtime.
Challenges
20% of respondents said proactive identification of risks is the top challenge in ensuring service availability, followed by change management (14%), lack of resources for testing (14%) and cross-domain/cross-team coordination (14%).
Cloudy Service
Nearly 30% of respondents said cloud service availability readiness is not on the same level as their other systems, 26% said their cloud application service availability readiness is better than their other systems, and 44% said they are equal.
Combatting Downtime
72% of respondents said they use virtualization HA (high availability) to ensure service availability in 2014, compared with 63% in 2013.