The average cost of an application going down has risen
to £150,000 an hour at Fortune 1,000 firms, according to a survey
of 300 IT managers.
Although a troubleshooting incident might cost £650 to resolve,
the economic cost of an application outage can be much higher, the
report from configuration management supplier
mValent found.
Ensuring high availability for mission-critical applications and
business services was the top priority for more than 90% of the
Fortune 1,000 IT managers polled.
The next highest priorities were to ensure IT audit/compliance,
with 79% rating it either top or high priority, and to improve IT's
ability to service the business.
More than eight out of 10 said ensuring IT compliance with
internal guidelines and external regulatory requirements is a top
priority or important this year. Improving IT productivity is high
on the list for 80% of respondents.
mValent found "the average
Global 2000 enterprise has more than 1000
applications, change is continuous and IT teams are being asked to
support an ever-growing volume of applications.
"On top of this, IT organisations are struggling with the fact
that the rate of IT infrastructure change has gone way up - a
significant complexity multiplier. In fact Gartner estimates that
until 2010, 60% of IT resources will be consumed by IT
change-related activity."
The survey found that the average Fortune 1000 firm has 11 staff
to deal with changes to systems. "This is a team sport," say the
researchers. Even so, "it takes more than four days to install a
complete application infrastructure stack," they add.
As a result more are turning to formal application support
teams, and six in 10 either have to plan to spend money on
automated configuration management systems.
Read the mValent survey>>
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