In the always-on global economy, access to enterprise data is critical, and interruptions and delays in the flow of information necessary for decision-making can have serious consequences.
“Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime: 2012 IOUG Database Availability Survey,” a new study fielded by Unisphere Research among IOUG members and sponsored by Oracle explores the issues related to planned and unplanned downtime, alongside database high availability and disaster recovery solutions. The survey which garnered input from 358 data managers and professionals, finds that at least half of the respondents are working to provide their organizations with real-time or near-real-time data, but the challenge to meeting this goal is increasing as data volumes escalate and the variety and velocity of data heightens as well. Although the volume, velocity and variety of data is presenting management and storage challenges, it also provides opportunity for businesses to enhance services to customers and make more informed decisions in a timely manner.
Among the key highlights and findings from the survey is that downtime is adding up to not just hours, but days per year for many organizations, and in fact 20% reported having three or more days of unplanned downtime during the past year, and close to half reported three or more days of planned downtime. Network outages were cited as the leading cause of unplanned downtime over the past year, followed by human error, server failures, and storage failures.
Half of respondents indicated that they are already tasked with providing real-time data, and many as well are managing in excess of a petabyte of data, yet only one-quarter of respondents say they back up this data on a real-time basis.
The executive summary of the survey report, “Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime: 2012 IOUG Database Availability Survey,” which is publicly available, and the full survey report, which is available exclusively to IOUG members can be found here.