A new research report, “Risk & Resilience: The Application Availability Gamble,” conducted by independent analyst firm Freeform Dynamics and sponsored by Neverfail, has found that one in five organizations suffer financial loss or damage to their brands on a quarterly basis due to risky business and IT practices. In addition, the majority of respondents suffer business disruption from failures on an ongoing basis. The report also found that inadequate monitoring, planning for application availability only after an outage and the absence of basic measures such as automated failover capabilities were the primary causes of application failures. The global survey sought input from more than 1,200 IT professionals.
Application failures have an enormous negative impact on productivity on a regular basis. More than 40 percent of respondents reported delays or interruptions that dramatically affected more than one part of their business every month, while more than 60 percent reported experiencing these delays on a quarterly basis. The ability to prevent application failures also was an issue. A staggering 95 percent do not get enough warning of an application failure to take preventative action.
Although roughly 85 percent of IT managers believe resiliency ideally should be considered early in the application lifecycle, only 15 percent of respondents dedicate IT budget and resources to resiliency in these early stages. Nearly 30 percent of all respondents make these considerations only after there is some type of disaster, making them three times more likely to experience a weekly loss in IT service due to application failure (versus those who secured funding earlier in the application lifecycle). Not surprisingly, funding for resiliency was easier to secure when proposed earlier in the lifecycle – 95 percent of respondents claimed that securing funding was either “quite challenging” or “very difficult” when considered as an after-thought.
The gap between what the business needs and what is actually in place is exemplified by an industry-wide lack of automated failover capabilities.
Roughly 75 percent of respondents “ideally want” automated failover for core business applications (sales, call center and manufacturing). However, less than 25 percent of respondents actually have this capability in place.
For email, even fewer organizations have automated failover in place. Of all respondents, only 20 percent have automated failover for email systems and less than five percent have it for mobile email access devices.
“There is a common view that IT managers have high availability and disaster recovery covered well enough to ensure the level of systems and application availability expected by the business. Sadly, this just is not the case,” said Dale Vile, research director, Freeform Dynamics. “The reality is that both planning and appropriate funding for systems resilience is typically not in place, and as a result, significant failure of IT systems is more common than people imagine. Our recommendation to organizations is to adopt a structured approach to business continuity planning at an early stage of the application lifecycle and select high availability and disaster recovery solutions that are suitable for their needs.”
“It goes without saying that if downtime hits your critical applications then your whole business will suffer, and in today’s world companies need protection for both planned and unplanned disasters,” said Andrew Barnes, SVP corporate development, Neverfail. “While applications will always be vulnerable to failure, this research reinforces that proactive steps, such as early planning for resilience as well as increased monitoring and automated failover of the application environment, can lessen the frequency and extent of these outages.”
This research was conducted by Freeform Dynamics under a community research program on behalf of Neverfail. The respondents included 1,223 IT professionals ranging from managers at the heart of the decision-making process to those at the sharp end of IT systems delivery. Half were from the UK, and the remainder from USA (20%), rest of Europe (16%) and rest of the World (15%). 26 percent of respondents came from organizations of more than 5,000 employees.
