A misapplied patch or failed application can lead to system downtime of anywhere between 30 minutes and four hours and although most IT managers now consider a service being unavailable for more than one hour as unacceptable only half have implemented a high availability solution.
Announcing results of a survey into attitudes towards availability of business applications, Double-Take Software Inc said the window of downtime that is acceptable to organisations is shrinking.
For 25% of respondents to its study a period of greater than four hours is viewed as an unacceptable level of downtime, but 69% stated a service being unavailable for any more than an hour would be deemed as unacceptable by their business.
As companies depend more and more on computer applications for day-to-day business operations, the cost of downtime has increased.
A conservative estimate produced a few years ago by Gartner pegged the hourly cost of downtime for computer networks at $42,000.
When PayPal ran into some network performance problems during the summer it was estimated that a one-hour outage would add up to $7.2 million in lost transactions, and the intermittent performance problems during the recovery period would likely boost that number even higher.Downtime usually leads to a cascade of related costs.
“Downtime continues to be a significant challenge, 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,” Double-Take said of its market assessment.
Double-Take of course sells software that ensures the availability of IT workloads for disaster recovery using real-time replication and failover that can protect an individual application, a server or a virtualised workload.
It found as many as 49% of the sites polled had no high availability solutions deployed to protect against outages.
