Research from continuous availability provider, Neverfail, polling 595 organizations worldwide on their approach to IT continuity, has found that despite an increased reliance on IT systems, 68.6 percent of organizations are still conducting at least four periods of planned systems maintenance per year, placing availability of business critical applications at risk if a solution to ensure continuous availability is not in place.

A further 59.6 percent of the organizations surveyed felt that it was acceptable to conduct planned maintenance during normal working hours, with 60.2 percent of planned outages lasting more than an hour. 73.3 percent of those businesses surveyed have now deployed a high availability solution to protect their organization from downtime during planned maintenance and unplanned IT outages, which allows for more flexible working and the assurance of productivity.

“In such a challenging economic climate, organizations cannot afford system downtime, due to the negative impact this can have in terms of revenue loss and damage to reputation,” said Andrew Barnes, SVP corporate development, Neverfail. “Upgrades and security threats mean that some level of planned IT maintenance is inevitable; however, that should not translate to a loss of service, and it is reassuring that more and more organisations today are recognising the need to deploy high availability solutions to keep systems up and running 24/7 in the face of both planned – and unplanned – maintenance.”

http://www.neverfailgroup.com/

•Date:23rd January 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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