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Service Availability Initiatives High on 2014 Agenda for IT - Outages Still Too Common

Doron Pinhas

Almost three-fourths of organizations surveyed have a service availability goal of over 99.91% for mission critical systems, yet more than half of the companies had an outage in the past 3 months, according to Continuity Software's 3rd annual Service Availability Benchmark Survey.

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. 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.


Doron Pinhas is CTO of Continuity Software.

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Service Availability Initiatives High on 2014 Agenda for IT - Outages Still Too Common

Doron Pinhas

Almost three-fourths of organizations surveyed have a service availability goal of over 99.91% for mission critical systems, yet more than half of the companies had an outage in the past 3 months, according to Continuity Software's 3rd annual Service Availability Benchmark Survey.

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. 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.


Doron Pinhas is CTO of Continuity Software.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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