New research from Veeam Software, and, in its fifth year, the Veeam Availability Report, 2016, reveals that 84%, a 2% 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. UAE enterprises were surveyed as part of the global report and the corresponding cost of application downtime for UAE businesses is $5.5 million a year.
With the number of the world’s connected population soaring to record levels last year (3.4 billion or around 42 percent of the globe) and predictions there will be almost 21 BILLION connected devices by the end of 2020, the need to deliver 24/7 access to data and applications has never been more important. However, it seems that enterprises have not received that message despite more than two-thirds of respondents stating that they have invested heavily in data centre modernisation specifically to increase availability levels.
“When you talk to more than 1,000 senior ITDMs you expect that there will be some that are still struggling to deliver on the needs of the Always-On Enterprise – the Enterprise that operates 24/7/365, but these findings are alarming,” stated Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam.
“Modern enterprises are becoming software-driven businesses, so IT departments can no longer get away with services that are ‘ok’; always-on availability is paramount. However, since our last study, the number of annual unplanned downtime events have increased (from 13 to 15) and they are also lasting longer and taking a far greater amount of time to recover. In today’s economy, where speed and reliability are imperative, this is unacceptable. If this trend continues, I fear for the companies we surveyed.”
Key findings from the UAE in 2016 Veeam Availability Report include:
Availability is of paramount importance… yet enterprises are failing
- Users want support for real-time operations (50%) and 24/7 global access to IT services to support international business (43%).
- When modernising their data centres, lower operational costs for IT (70%) and enabling 24/7 always-on business operations to cater to increasing user demands (40%) are the two most sought-after capabilities; however, cost and lack of skills is inhibiting deployment.
- Organisations have increased their service level requirements to minimise application downtime (100%) or guarantee access to data (77%) to some extent over the past two years, but the Availability Gap still remains.
- To address this, however, respondents stated that their organisations are currently, or are intending in the near future, to modernise their data centre in some way – virtualisation (76%) and backups (93%) are among the most common areas to update for this purpose.
Data at risk
- 70% of respondents (senior IT decisions-makers) in the UAE 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.
- Respondents report that the organisation’s written Service Level Agreements (SLAs) average for recovery point objectives (RPOs) for its mission-critical applications is 40 minutes and for non mission-critical applications is a little over 1 hour. Respondents say that their organisations can recover mission-critical data in an average of 50 minutes for its mission-critical applications and 1 hour 20 minutes for its non mission critical applications. As a result, a gap remains.
- A high 50% of respondents revealed their organisations’ applications encounter unplanned downtime caused by IT failures, external forces or other factors 21 to 30 times a year. On an average, organisation’s applications encounter unplanned downtime 22 times a year.
- On an average, each individual instance of unplanned downtime of mission-critical applications lasts for 1 hour 22 minutes. The same for non mission-critical applications is over an hour and a half
- When IT services fail, an important consideration is whether back-ups can be recovered with certainty. The recovery of organisations’ backups fails in an average of nearly 40% of cases.
- An average of only 1.18% of back-ups are tested for recoverability each quarter by organisations. 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 organisations.
‘Financial’ impact is substantial
- As a result, the estimated average annual cost of downtime to enterprises can be up to $5.5 million.
- Average per hour cost of one mission-critical application downtime is a little under $ 70,000.
- 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 $66,000
- Damage to brand integrity (77%) and Loss of employee confidence (70%) were the top two ‘non-financial’ results of poor availability cited.
Drawbacks of Legacy technology and Prohibitive cost of new technology
- 70% respondents would like to have data loss avoidance, but of this group, over 70% cannot not achieve this because of the cost of new technology. Nearly a third (30%) also say their current product does not provide these capabilities. 37% respondents also say they would like to have high speed recovery for any application or server or virtual machine that goes down, but out of these 73% say their current product does not provide these capabilities.
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software says, “There is an urgent need for organisations in this region to plug the availability gap. It is a good sign that nine in ten organisations in UAE intend to change or augment their current backup and disaster recovery solution, with the average timeframe for this change being five 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 realise 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.”
To download the full version of Veeam’s Availability Report, click here https://go.veeam.com/2016-availability-report.html.
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