There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications.
Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. More and more organizations of all sizes now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.
In fact, in the enterprise space 14% of the businesses polled said they cannot tolerate any application downtime. More than 58% cannot tolerate four hours or less of application downtime. All told, more than 80% of Enterprise-class and mid-tier respondents reported that they cannot tolerate more than 24 hours of application unavailability2. What is even more interesting is that survey respondents were not just from the
Financial Sector but also included Government, Manufacturing, Retail and Health Care (including Pharmaceutical). Some of the reasons for these survey results include the following:
- Retail: The critical applications that track point-of-sales data and enable inventory and distribution require applications that are always available. Being able to react quickly to changing conditions can mean the difference between profitability and loss. Online shopping and the customer’s experience are also very important to retailers, and downtime is not acceptable.
- Health Care: With the digitization of medical images and patient records, retaining and ensuring availability of these applications and files is beyond mission-critical. Especially when you consider the pervasive use of technology in the operating room, effectiveness can actually be measured in the number of lives, not just dollars, saved.
- Manufacturing: Competitive pressures drive companies to run as efficiently as possible. Just-in-time manufacturing processes that coordinate shipments from suppliers around the world demand 24 x 7 availability.
- Globalization: Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on a global economy. Many have established key technology in “follow-the-sun” modes that require 24 x 7 availability.
- Increased sensitivity to outages: Business continuity is now a boardroom-level concern. In many cases, it is the CEO who mandates that the business be fully protected. Even worse than an outage itself is the fallout from negative press, loss of customer confidence and, for public companies, potential impact to stock prices.
Regardless of the industry, the trend is clear: more businesses require highly available solutions. Not only is this expanding along industry lines, but we also see mid-tier companies requiring disaster tolerant solutions.