FINAL WORD
T
his 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% 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.
GREGG PETERSEN
“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 softwaredriven 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-
84
INTELLIGENTCIO
Regional Director, Middle East
and SAARC, Veeam Software
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
Seventy percent 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 one 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.
“MODERN ENTERPRISES ARE BECOMING SOFTWAREDRIVEN BUSINESSES, SO IT DEPARTMENTS CAN NO
LONGER GET AWAY WITH SERVICES THAT ARE ‘OK’;
ALWAYS-ON AVAILABILITY IS PARAMOUNT…”
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