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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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Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

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Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

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