Despite numerous high-profile incidents in the last year, global enterprises are still not paying enough attention to the needs of their users, new research from Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, revealed. In its fifth year, Veeam Availability Report 2016 showed that 84 percent, a two percent increase on 2014, of senior IT decisions-makers (ITDMs) across the globe admit to suffering an ‘Availability Gap' (the gap between what IT can deliver and what users demand). This costs businesses up to $16 million a year in lost revenue and productivity, in addition to the negative impact on customer confidence and brand integrity. Saudi enterprises were surveyed as part of the global report and the corresponding cost of application downtime for businesses in Saudi is $8.2 million a year. The report further showed that in Saudi Arabia, availability is of paramount importance, "yet enterprises are failing." Users want support for real-time operations (60 percent) and 24/7 global access to IT services to support international business (43 percent), the report noted. When modernizing their data centers, lower operational costs for IT (67%) and enabling 24/7 always-on business operations to cater to increasing user demands (40%) are the two most sought-after capabilities, it said, however, cost and lack of skills is inhibiting deployment. Besides, organizations have increased their service level requirements to minimize application downtime (100%) or guarantee access to data (74%) to some extent over the past two years, but the availability gap still remains. To address this, however, respondents stated that their organizations are currently, or are intending in the near future, to modernize their data center in some way – virtualization (43%) and backups (97%) are among the most common areas to update for this purpose. Moreover, 77% of respondents (senior IT decisions-makers) in Saudi Arabia admitted to an ‘Availability Gap' (the gap between how fast you can recover applications and how fast you need applications to be recovered) and cannot meet end-users' requirements for an always-on business. A high 60% of respondents revealed their organizations' applications encounter unplanned downtime caused by IT failures, external forces or other factors 21 to 30 times a year. On an average, organization's applications encounter unplanned downtime 23 times a year. On an average, each individual instance of unplanned downtime of mission-critical applications lasts for 50 minutes. The same for non mission-critical applications is nearly 1 hour. When IT services fail, an important consideration is whether back-ups can be recovered with certainty. The recovery of organizations' backups fails in an average of over 40% of cases, the report noted. An average of only 1.81% of back-ups are tested for recoverability each quarter by organizations. Long gaps between testing increase the chance of issues being found when data needs to be recovered – at which point it may be too late for these organizations. Moreover, the report said as a result, the estimated average annual cost of downtime to enterprises can be up to $8.2 million. Average per hour cost of one mission-critical application downtime is a little over $65,000. Non-backed-up data will be lost in the event of IT failure. The average per hour cost of data loss, i.e. data that is proved to be unrecoverable in the event of one critical application downtime is over $45,000 Loss of employee confidence (80%) and damage to brand integrity (73%) were the top two ‘non-financial' results of poor availability cited. In addition, 73% respondents would like to have data loss avoidance in their data center, but of this group, over 55% cannot not achieve this because of the cost of new technology. Nearly half (45%) also say their current product does not provide these capabilities. Rawad Zaki, country manager, Saudi Arabia at Veeam Software, said "there is an urgent need for organizations in Saudi (Arabia) to plug the availability gap. It is a good sign that 97 percent of organizations in the country intend to change or augment their current backup and disaster recovery solution, with the average timeframe for this change being 5 months. It is not always easy to divert precious funds to invest on infrastructure, but there is acceptance that this needs to be done. We are seeing enterprises starting to realize the importance of availability solutions and, in particular, the role cloud and cloud-based services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can play. Enterprises appreciate the need for an Always-On, always-available operation and I am confident that users will see this become a reality sooner rather than later." — SG
