A survey of more than 1,000 UK IT managers and C-level executives from public and private sector organisations shows that almost half are unaware of the hourly costs of downtime to their organisations.

Considering that a fifth of IT staff have experienced downtime lasting more than a full business day and almost all organisations have suffered an outage at some stage, business disruption and cost of IT failure is not quite the priority it should be.

The survey also found that businesses remain reluctant to turn to cloud facilities due to cost and reliability, although deployment of critical applications on virtual machines is strong. Almost 40% of respondents were unsure of cloud platforms as a viable option for disaster recovery, while a further 31.3% would not consider a hosted cloud infrastructure as a method for protecting IT resources. According to this survey, commissioned by Neverfail, security (27.4%), cost (20.4%), and the reliability of third-party services (16.9%) were the key causes for apprehension, highlighting that despite the possible long-term economic and efficiency advantages of cloud-based environments, IT decision makers remain reluctant to host disaster recovery environments in public clouds. Of those that were able to calculte, almost 20% of respondents stated that the hourly cost of downtime amounts to more than £5,000, with 12.7% of those surveyed suggesting that this loss would equate to more than £10,000 per hour.

Interestingly, while cloud computing remains an area for concern, the survey found that the deployment of critical applications on virtual machines is strong, with 58.3 % of respondents having now migrated tier one applications to virtual platforms. This demonstrates a maturity in the virtualisation market, particularly as businesses and IT staff are better equipped and trained to migrate and maintain virtually hosted applications.

Other key findings from the survey include:

-During periods of downtime, 42.4% of respondents are contacted incessantly by internal workers until the IT problems are resolved.
-58.8% of businesses rely on C-level executives to define the criteria of critical applications.
-42.7% of respondents indicated a need for 24-7 accessibility to critical applications.
-38.8% of outages are caused by power cuts or data centre problems.

“It’s clear that many businesses remain wary about the stability of cloud-based infrastructures as disaster recovery platforms. Without access to business resources, severe financial implications and reputational damage are very real consequences, as well as long, drawn out processes in getting users back online,” said Bob Roudebush of Neverfail.

“An interesting observation from this survey is the high numbers of businesses running tier one applications on virtual machines, supporting an industry trend that suggests end-users are using virtualization as a stepping stone to adopting cloud services. Nevertheless, companies continue to need advice on how to protect their critical applications. By re-thinking availability strategies as infrastructure changes are instigated, IT decision makers can ensure that a good level of resiliency is in place to avoid any downtime..."

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