Challenges of running cloud-hosted applications

CloudEndure revealed the results of an industry-first benchmark survey, presenting best practices and success metrics reported by companies that host web applications in the public cloud.

The survey disclosed a clear gap between an organization’s official service availability goals and its ability to measure them. Although 79% of organizations surveyed report a service availability goal of “three nines”—99.9% or better—26% of the respondents fail to measure service availability at all.

The survey findings show a mix of achievements and challenges faced by companies running cloud-hosted applications. Over one-fourth of respondents don’t measure service availability, yet 92% claim they meet their uptime goals consistently (43%) or most of the time (49%).

A clear gap exists between the number of respondents who claim to meet availability goals and how many are actually measuring them.

“The inconsistencies in survey responses reflect the immaturity of business continuity practices in the public cloud domain,” said Ofer Gadish, CEO of CloudEndure. “We see a huge demand for solutions that can help companies address the challenges of downtime in the cloud”

According to the survey, the primary challenges executives face in meeting availability goals are insufficient IT resources, budget limitations, and limited ability to prevent software bugs. In fact, 15% of the organizations surveyed don’t invest any time in backup or disaster recovery, and 37% spend less than $1000 on backup and disaster recovery per year.