BOSTON, Ma. — Two out of five businesses – 40 percent – report that their major business applications require higher availability rates than they did two or three years ago, but an overwhelming 81 percent are unable to quantify the cost of downtime. Those are the results of a new survey from Information Technology Intelligence Corporation (ITIC), a high-tech research and consulting firm.
The survey polled 300 C-level executives and IT managers at 300 corporations worldwide. However, the survey findings also indicated that approximately half of all businesses – 49 percent – lack the budget for high availability technology. Additionally, 40 percent of the respondents said they don’t understand what qualifies as high availability. Eight out of 10 IT managers can’t quantify the cost of downtime to their C-level executives.
“The demand for application availability has grown, particularly with the emergence of Virtualization 2.0. However, network uptime isn’t keeping pace. Only two out of 10 companies understand that four nines – 99.99 percent availability and above – is what they need today. The inability of users to put valid metrics and cost formulas in place to track and quantify what uptime means to their organization is woefully inadequate,”
Survey Results Summary
• 54 percent of IT managers and executives surveyed said more than two-thirds of their companies’ applications require the highest level of availability. Yet, 41 percent would be satisfied with conventional 99 to 99.9 percent availability for their most critical applications, which does not qualify as a high-availability or continuous-availability solution.
• 81 percent said the number of applications that demand high availability has increased in the past two-to-three years.
• Of those who said they have been unable to meet service level agreements (SLAs), 72 percent can’t or don’t keep track of the cost and productivity losses created by downtime.
Comments from Respondents
• “We are continually being asked to do more with less. We are now at a point, where the number of complex systems requiring expert knowledge has exceeded the headcount needed to maintain them … I am dreading vacation season.”
• "We are an Application Service Provider. While our SLA guarantees are fairly modest - 98% uptime - We have found that we have to compensate our larger clients for any significant downtime. We had a half day outage a couple of years ago which cost us in excess of $40,000 in goodwill payouts to a handful of our clients, despite the fact that it was the first outage in 5 years."
• “If people knew the actual dollar value their customers represent, they’d already have the necessary software availability solutions in place to safeguard applications.”
• “Most of the time, our biggest concerns center around keeping what we have running and available. Change usually costs money, and at the moment our budgets are simply in survival mode.”
Survey methodology
The ITIC survey was commissioned by Stratus Technologies in Maynard, Ma. ITIC conducted a blind, non product-specific survey of 300 IT professionals and queried them on their application availability requirements, virtualization and service level agreement compliance. The Web-based survey consisted of multiple choice and essay questions. ITIC analysts also conducted two dozen first person customer interviews to obtain detailed anecdotal data.
Respondents ranged from SMBs with 100 users to very large enterprises with over 100,000 end users. Industries represented:
