Too many organizations miss their service availability goals

Continuity Software announced the results of its 3rd annual Service Availability Benchmark Survey, designed to enable IT infrastructure, business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) professionals to compare their organization’s performance and practices to that of their peers.

The key findings of the report, based on responses from 155 IT professionals across a wide range of industries and geographies, reveal:

• Over half of the companies (59%) had an outage in the past 3 months and 28% had an outage in the past month.
• 41% of the organization surveyed missed their service availability goal for mission-critical systems in 2013.
• 66% of the respondents have initiatives for improving service availability management in 2014.
• Proactive identification of risks is the top challenge 20% of the respondents face in ensuring service availability.
• The most common and most effective strategy for ensuring service availability is virtualization HA, used by 72% of the respondents this year compared to 63% in 2013.

“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,” said Doron Pinhas, CTO, Continuity Software.

“IT teams are finding themselves in a never-ending chase to keep up with the pace of change across the IT landscape. As the survey results show, IT organizations are increasingly recognizing that a proactive approach to risk identification is more effective for outage prevention than playing catchup,” Pinhas added.