IT disaster recovery, cloud computing and information security news

Cloud Endure has released the results of a recent survey into public cloud usage, downtime, availability and disaster recovery.

The 2015 Public Cloud Disaster Recovery Survey looks at disaster recovery challenges and best practices. It also benchmarks the best practices of companies that host web applications in the public cloud. The survey received responses from 109 IT professionals from North America and Europe.

Key findings include:

  • The number one risk to system availability is human error followed by networks failures and cloud provider downtime.
  • While the vast majority of the organizations surveyed (83 percent) have a service availability goal of 99.9 percent or better, almost half of the companies (44 percent) had at least one outage in the past three months, and over a quarter (27 percent) had an outage in the past month.
  • The cost of a day of downtime in 37 percent of the organizations is more than $10,000.
  • When it comes to service availability, there is a clear gap between how organizations perceive their track record and the reality of their capabilities. While almost all respondents claim they meet their availability goals consistently (37 percent) or most of the time (50 percent), 28 percent of the organizations surveyed don’t measure service availability at all. It is hard to tell how these organizations claim to meet their goals when they are not able to measure them.
  • The top challenges in meeting availability goals are budget limitations, insufficient IT resources, and lack of in-house expertise.
  • There is a strong correlation between the cost of downtime and the average hours per week invested in backup and disaster recovery.

Read the survey report (registration required).


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