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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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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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