Continuity Software, the leading provider of IT Operations Analytics for infrastructure outage prevention, today announced the release of version 7.1 of its award winning AvailabilityGuard software. The new release provides enterprise IT teams with advanced predictive analytics, risk detection, and outage prevention capabilities across their VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud environments.

While VMware has long been the leading virtualization solution for private cloud deployments, Microsoft Hyper-V has been the fastest growing platform over the past five years. In 2014, the two platforms had a combined market share of over 75%, according to IDC.

AvailabilityGuard empowers IT infrastructure teams with predictive IT Operations Analytics capabilities that ensure resiliency, high availability, and operational excellence. The solution allows IT organizations to proactively identify deviations from vendor best practices and mitigate hidden configuration flaws that may introduce downtime and data loss risks across the entire infrastructure.

Cloud Environments Are Not as Resilient Yet 

A new survey conducted by Continuity Software shows that private cloud environments are not as resilient as traditional datacenters. Close to half of the companies (45%) that have migrated portions of their mission-critical systems to the private cloud environment fail to meet their availability goals (compared to 30% of the companies that have not migrated to the cloud).

Bridging the Knowledge Gap 

The survey further shows that the primary challenge in ensuring IT resiliency is keeping up with new technologies and vendor best practices, creating a knowledge gap that IT teams are struggling to close. The gap is particularly evident for companies that are in the process of transitioning to the cloud, with two-thirds of these companies reporting the knowledge gap and proactive identification of risks as their primary challenges.

AvailabilityGuard enables IT teams to bridge the knowledge gap with built-in verification of vendor best practices and automated detection of risky misconfigurations. The latest release of AvailabilityGuard 7.1 provides expanded coverage of multiple private cloud systems including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, equipping IT teams with the following capabilities:

• Identify single-points-of-failure and other configuration risks
• Comply with vendor best practices across all layers of the infrastructure
• Verify configuration changes before they impact the business
• Track KPI's that support continuous improvement
• Establish safer and more agile best practices

"While the transition of mission-critical systems to the cloud has been underway for several years, IT organizations have a steep learning curve to go through," said Doron Pinhas, CTO, Continuity Software. "The level of organizational competency and the maturity of the tools for managing private cloud environments are still far from where they need to be to ensure enterprise-grade resiliency. The latest release of AvailabilityGuard allows IT organizations close the knowledge gap and eradicate bad practices and risky configurations across the IT landscape - from the traditional datacenter to the emerging cloud infrastructure."

Additional new capabilities in Version 7.1 of AvailabilityGuard include direct connectivity to Brocade and Cisco fabric management consoles, as well as Infinidat storage. Support for these systems further expands the IT landscape covered by AvailabilityGuard across all IT infrastructure layers, with over 6,000 built-in risk signatures for all major Unix and Windows operating systems, storage solutions (EMC, HP, IBM, and NetApp), databases, application servers, virtualization, SAN fabric, and more.