CloudEndure's 2016 Disaster Recovery Challenges and Best Practices survey findings include more than 30 figures and corresponding charts. Complimentary copies of the results are now available for download at http://info.cloudendure.com/2016-DR-Survey-Results.html.

The latest survey disclosed some important realities about disaster recovery, backup, availability goals, downtime costs and responses. The risks and challenges addressed in CloudEndure's survey reflect that while some areas of disaster recovery have improved, other areas still need enhancements. In general, there is increased confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery.

"While more companies continue to migrate large portions of their business data to the cloud, our survey findings are clear. Companies that invest in DR are likely to reap an upside in savings from the cost of downtime disrupting their operations," said Ofer Gadish, CEO of CloudEndure.

Key survey findings include:

• The #1 risk to system availability is human errors. This is followed by networks failures and application bugs.
• 57% of companies surveyed had at least 1 outage in the past 3 months.
• The cost of downtime for 73% of organizations is $10,000 per day or higher.
• There's a 26% growth in Public Cloud usage for disaster recovery coming clearly at the expense of physical servers, which are declining by 55% as target DR platforms.

The top challenges in meeting availability goals continue to be insufficient IT resources and budget limitations. Lack of in-house expertise surpassed a limited ability to prevent software bugs as the third top challenge, despite application bugs ranking the #3 risk to system availability.

While the majority of organizations surveyed (77%) have a service availability goal of 99.9% or better ("three nines" or less than 9 hours of downtime a year):

• more than half of the companies, 57%, had at least one outage in the past 3 months,
• and almost a third, 31%, had an outage in the past week or month.

When it comes to service availability, there is a clear gap between how organizations perceive their track records and the reality of their capabilities. While almost all respondents claim that they meet their availability goals consistently (38%) or most of the time (52%), 22% of the organizations surveyed don't measure service availability at all. Similar to last year's survey, a clear gap still exists between the number of respondents who confirm to meet availability goals and how many are actually measuring them.