No strategy for data protection?

While financial services organizations are obligated to establish and report stringent service availability objectives for mission-critical systems, they are actually among the worst performing in regards to meeting these goals.

In fact, 41% of those surveyed by Continuity Software acknowledged that they did not meet their service availability goals for mission-critical systems in 2012.

Based upon responses from IT executives across a wide range of industries, the results reveal that much like the financial services industry, they also have highly commendable service availability goals for mission-critical systems. Nonetheless, 32% of the organizations surveyed reported that they did not meet their goals.

2013 Financial Services IT Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark Survey:

• 89% of financial service organizations have an availability goal of >99.76% (less than 22 hours of downtime a year); 67% have a goal of >99.91% (less than eight hours); and 25% have a goal of 99.99% (less than one hour).
• 41% of the survey respondents did not meet their goals.
• 41% conduct complete DR tests at least annually; 26% don’t ever conduct a complete test.
• 73% run mission-critical applications in a private cloud environment; 30% run mission-critical applications in the public cloud.
• 37% do not have any process in place to test reliability of private cloud systems.

2013 Enterprise Service Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark Survey:

• 90% of business organizations have an availability goal of >99.76% (less than 22 hours of downtime a year); 68% have a goal of >99.91% (less than eight hours); 27% have a goal of 99.99% (less than one hour).
• 32% of the survey respondents did not meet their goals.
• The lowest downtime figures were reported by respondents from the transportation industry (3.7 hours average/year), followed by high-tech (4 hours), and business service organizations (4.2 hours).
• The highest downtime figures were reported by respondents from the healthcare industry (14.1 hours), financial services (8.9 hours) and public sector organizations (8.5 hours).
• 71% run mission-critical applications in a private cloud environment; 33% run mission-critical applications in the public cloud.
• 40% do not have any process in place to test reliability of cloud systems.