Public cloud
A new report looks at business resilience challenges for IT leaders, including migrations, high availability and disaster recovery, the cloud and data sharing.
44% of IT leaders experienced a migration failure, representing an increase of more than 20% between 2014 and 2015.
70% of IT pros did not calculate the estimated hourly cost of migration downtime.
55% of IT pros cited the inability to start applications on the new server in the required timeframe as the biggest reason for migration failure, followed by a lack of testing (38%).
49% of IT leaders used a combination of consultants and internal staff for migrations, and 42% only used internal staff. One of the biggest challenges: staff working overtime during the weekend.
The average number of data protection technologies dropped from 2.9 in 2014 to 2.6 in 2015.
Plans for data protection technologies were split between hardware-based storage (35%) and software-based solutions. However, 26% of IT pros said they will use third-party services, such as managed services, cloud and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).
85% of IT pros said they either had no recovery plan or were less than 100% confident that their plan was complete. Globally, only 15% were completely confident.
57% of companies use public clouds, followed by hosted private (50%) and hybrid (40%) clouds.
Widely used cloud models include software-as-a-service (72%) and infrastructure as a service (59%).
49% of IT pros report that maintaining control of their infrastructure is a challenge with cloud, followed by concern about protecting data access from other cloud customers (46%).
79% of companies rely on multiple databases, including those associated with business applications, and 68% with multiple databases share data among databases.
70% of IT pros are concerned about inconsistent information stored in different databases, which resulted in delaying critical decisions (42%), spending time reconciling discrepancies (41%) and low confidence in decisions (32%).
The number of companies using, evaluating or planning to evaluate big data increased from 28% in 2014 to 43% in 2015.
52% of IT pros said they are considering outsourcing their IT functions.
36% of IT pros said managed services was the top service likely to be outsourced, followed by audit (28%), HA/DR monitoring (25%) and application updates (23%).