News

posted on 30 June 2008 09:15

A Neverfail-sponsored survey found that apps fail frequently with operations staff having to pick up the pieces when forethought by the development team could prevent 'tangible business damage' occurring.

The research report, “Risk & Resilience: The Application Availability Gamble" was produced by Freeform Dynamics, who interviewed more than 1,200 IT staff.

Freeform Dynamic's Martin Atherton, a principal analyst, said: "We talked to the guys at the coal face. They get applications thrown to them over the wall by developerrs who haven't considered resiliency up front."

The report found one in five organizations suffer financial loss or damage to their brands on a quarterly basis due to risky business and IT practices. More than 40 percent of respondents reported delays or interruptions that dramatically affected more than one part of their business every month, while more than 60 percent reported experiencing these delays on a quarterly basis. Unsurprisingly 95 percent do not get enough warning of an application failure to take preventative action - when app crashes happen they happen suddenly.

Atherton said: "We have established that there is a lot of application failure." Inadequate monitoring, planning for application availability only after an outage, and the absence of basic measures such as automated failover capabilities were the primary causes of application failures.

The report also found that although, intuitively, it should be relatively easy to get funding for app resiliency features after an app crashes, that is not the case. The reality of business budgeting processes means that it is easier to get funding beforehand rather than after the event.

Interestingly, although around 75 percent of respondents “ideally want” automated failover for core business applications (sales, call center and manufacturing), less than 25 percent of respondents actually have this capability in place.

The recommendation is that organisations should adopt a structured approach to business continuity planning, at an early stage of the application lifecycle, and select high availability and disaster recovery solutions that are suitable for their needs.

That means they should plan for the eventuality that their applications will fail. Well .... yes, indeed.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}