Survey looks at attitudes to downtime and availability

Double-Take Software has published the results of a survey into attitudes towards the availability of business applications. The survey found that over 69 percent of IT managers stated that a service being unavailable for more than one 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 organization.

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 organization. Overall, the responses show that a significant number of organizations recognise the impact that downtime could have on their critical IT systems and therefore their business.

The window of downtime that is acceptable to organizations is shrinking even during large-scale migration projects. Over 55 percent of organizations 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 organizations 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.

www.doubletake.com

•Date: 25th Sept 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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