Helping Combat Downtime, On-Premise and in the Cloud
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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.
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Defining MSPs' Goals, Challenges and Tools 
Why Metrics Matter to the Channel Disaster recovery and business continuity plans should be re-evaluated regularly. A majority of IT professionals said they have experienced critical outages over the past three months, and more than 41 percent have missed their service availability goals for mission-critical systems, costing businesses thousands, and even millions, of dollars in downtime, according to a survey conducted by Continuity Software, a provider of service availability risk management technology. "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," Doron Pinhas, Continuity Software CTO, said in a statement. One of the biggest challenges they face is proactively identifying risks to ensure service availability. This is where IT service providers have the opportunity to work with organizations to help them evaluate potential areas of risk and develop and implement a plan to ensure business continuity management and disaster recovery services on-premise and in the cloud. Here are key findings of the study.