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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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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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