Companies urged to take care of their IT downtime

Manama : With business transformation being driven by a new breed of user – one that desires a seamless, connected experience – the ability for modern enterprises to deliver non-stop services and continually innovate has never been more urgent, according to a recent research by Veeam titled “Global Availability Report.”

Veeam says that most organisations are not well prepared yet and to combat this, they are investing in their data centers. But what is alarming is that, despite obvious investment, the average number of unplanned downtime events reported has increased since 2014. The average length of each downtime event has also increased from less than one and a half hours to almost two hours for mission-critical applications.

“The result of these increases is that the average annual cost of downtime to organisations can be up to US$16 million,” the research calculates.

“It is clear that the government in Bahrain is striving to create an enabling environment for its citizens. Against this scenario, an ‘Always-On’ approach will be key to facilitating a high availability public sector geared to meet the needs of all its stakeholders,” said Gregg Petersen Regional Director, MEA and SAARC at Veeam on the lessons for Kingdom from this global study.

In terms of requirements, there is not much to differentiate between private and public sector requirements. Both, government and corporates have started the migration to the modern data centre through virtualisation and they require a high level of up-time. The biggest differentiator revolves around planning and modernisation initiatives, the research added.

“The private sector is more mature than government when it comes to implementation around the modern data centre. Fortunately, the government in Bahrain is currently investigating these components to leverage modern technology.”

Organisations must stop the increase of unplanned downtime incidents if they wish to avoid the risk of suffering a significant setback. And with the increasing proportion of organizations’ mission-critical workloads, the risks can only increase further, Veeam report stated.