Neverfail, a global software company specializing in continuous availability software for disaster recovery and high availability, today revealed results compiled from a survey of 1,473 SME and Enterprise IT professionals in the U.S. regarding their disaster recovery plans and practices. 

Findings show that the cloud is perceived by nearly half of the respondents to be a viable option for disaster recovery, however many have yet to overcome security and reliability concerns. The cost of information technology (IT) downtime is still elusive - 54% cannot quantify the cost of an hour of downtime. At the application level, availability has never been more critical. Microsoft Exchange and SQL ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively as the top mission-critical applications. The details of the results follow.

Disaster Recovery and the Cloud

• The cloud is gaining traction. Forty-four percent of respondents consider the cloud to be a viable option for disaster recovery. Thirty percent do not, and 26% are unsure.
• For those who do not consider the cloud to be viable for DR, the majority (34%) say it is due to their lack of confidence in cloud security.
• Yet, 72% of those surveyed run mission-critical applications on virtual machines.

The Cost and Impact of Downtime

• Twenty-three percent of respondents have had an IT outage for more than one full business day, and only five percent report never experiencing an outage.
• Hardware or software problems cause most of the IT outages (43% of respondents), while others reported power or datacenter outages (35%), natural disasters (8%), human error (6%) and other (8%)
• Downtime is painful, and workers require instant fixes. Almost half (47%) of the IT personnel surveyed received immediate notification of downtime. Thirty-six percent were alerted when people tried to access an application, and only 17% were not aware of an outage.
• Surprisingly, 54% of respondents do not know the hourly cost of downtime. Of those who do, 16% rated it greater than $10,000, 7% rated it between $5,001 and $10,000, and the rest rated it under $5,000.
• Downtime frequency during the past year ranged from zero (31%) to once (32%), twice (21%) and three or more times (16%).

Application Availability
 

• Seventy-six percent of surveyed organizations identify their most critical applications. In order of priority, respondents ranked them as follows:

1. Microsoft Exchange (30%)
2. Microsoft SQL (26%)
3. Microsoft Sharepoint (13%)
4. Blackberry Enterprise Server (11%)
    

• The consequences of application downtime ranged from reduced employee productivity (30%), to revenue loss (26%), damaged corporate reputation (23%) and missed service levels (19%).
• Of those surveyed, 44% reported that more than 1,000 people rely on their No. 1 mission critical application each day. And 69% require access to that application 24 hours a day, seven days a week.