A Service Unavailable for More Than One Hour is Unacceptable for IT Managers

Double-Take Software, Inc. announced the results of a survey into attitudes towards IT and availability of business applications, which revealed that over 69 percent of IT managers stated that a service being unavailable for more than 1 hour was unacceptable to their business. This inability to withstand the loss of critical applications demonstrates the value that an investment in high availability and business continuity can provide back to the organisation.

Of the remaining respondents surveyed, 25 percent saw a period of greater than four hours as an unacceptable level of downtime. For five percent of businesses, between four and eight hours of downtime for a service was acceptable, while only one percent said they thought that an outage of more than eight hours was acceptable to their organisation. Overall, the responses show that a significant number of organisations recognise the impact that downtime could have on their critical IT systems and therefore their business.

“Downtime continues to be a significant challenge for most organisations, and the impact of a system failure or loss of data can be extremely detrimental to individual users, overall company performance and also reputation with customers,” said Ian Masters, sales and marketing director UK and Ireland, Double-Take Software. “Businesses should have a continuity strategy in place, and protection for core IT assets and workloads is a fundamental part of this plan. Even in the event of a full site failure, businesses should be able to recover their critical applications and data quickly, to ensure that ongoing operations are not significantly affected. There are solutions available to meet these requirements that are quick to implement either internally or as part of a managed service, and they can provide both greater flexibility to IT workloads as well as protection against the risk of downtime.”

The window of downtime that is acceptable to organisations is shrinking even during large-scale migration projects. Over 55 percent of organisations carrying out necessary updates or upgrades to company IT systems stated that four hours or less was an acceptable period of downtime. 32 percent stated that between four and eight hours’ downtime was satisfactory, and 12 percent said that over eight hours would be allowed in these circumstances. The number of organisations for whom downtime remains unacceptable means that either upgrades would have to be performed outside of normal working hours, requiring either additional expenses for overtime or for IT staff to give up their time for free.

“The impact of an IT migration project can be significant on an organisation: it can quickly provide a better level of business performance and a competitive advantage in the marketplace if it is done correctly. If not, it can lead to acute frustration, unhappy customers and employees as things drag on,” continued Masters. “Planning a project properly and using the right workload migration strategy can shrink the window of downtime significantly and reduce or eliminate additional costs that might be incurred, as well as helping organisations achieve their desired results faster. The ultimate additional benefit for IT is getting their weekends and evenings back again.”

The survey, carried out by eMedia on behalf of Double-Take Software, received 158 responses across a range of vertical markets and company sizes.

Survey Results

What is an acceptable amount of downtime
for a server or application during normal business?

• Less than one hour – 69 percent
• One – four hours – 25 percent
• Four – eight hours – 5 percent
• More than eight hours – 1 percent

What is an acceptable amount of time
for a server or data to be unavailable
during IT migration projects?

• Less than one hour – 13 percent
• One – four hours – 42 percent
• Four – eight hours – 32 percent
• More than eight hours – 12 percent

Have you implemented a high availability solution?

• Yes – 51 percent
• No – 49 percent