System Outages Can Stall Digital Transformations- Valutrics

The majority of organizations experience unplanned IT systems outages, which can stall their digital transformation efforts, according to a recent survey from Veeam Software. The resulting report, “Why Organizations Still Struggle to Digitally Transform and Innovate,” indicates that this issue speaks to bigger-picture problems in the form of what are called “availability gaps” and “protection gaps.” The report defines availability gaps as the difference between the service levels expected by business units and an organization’s ability to deliver the applications and information that users demand. Protection gaps are defined as IT’s inability to protect data often enough to ensure that the business units’ expectations against data loss are met. Most companies are struggling with both types of gaps, and they’re losing millions of dollars in the process. It doesn’t help that servers frequently go on the fritz—with the subsequent downtime exceeding what’s considered acceptable. This leads to lost customer and employee confidence, as well as damage to brand integrity. “We’ve never been as dependent on technology as we are today, nor have we had as many critical business functions and personnel that rely so heavily on their data,” according to the report. “For organizations to achieve their business goals, they are looking to digital transformation and the cloud to deliver more efficient, agile and reliable services to meet user needs. As part of this transformation, IT teams have to do an increasingly better job to ensure their systems’ availability and protection.” A total of 1,060 global IT decision-makers took part in the research, which was conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).