How well are high availability applications supported?

Most businesses have critical applications that are vital to their remaining in operation. But support for these programs is a mixed picture according to a new report.

The study from application availability specialist SIOS Technology finds 86 percent of organizations are operating their high availability (HA) applications with some kind of clustering or high availability mechanism in place.

Even so, 95 percent of respondents report that they have occasional failure in the underlying HA services that support their applications. Also 98 percent of respondents say that they see either regular or occasional application performance issues. When such issues occur, for most organizations, it takes between three and five hours to identify the cause and correct the issue and it means using between two and four tools to do so.

Small companies are leading the way by operating their HA applications in the cloud and more than half (54 percent) of small companies intend to be running 50 percent or more of their HA applications in the cloud by the end of 2018.

For companies of all sizes, control of the application environment remains a key reason why workloads remain on premises, with 60 percent of respondents saying that this has played a factor in retaining one or more HA application in house rather than moving it to the cloud.

"There are some important trends that emerge from the report: first, it's clear that organizations understand that the cloud lacks the guarantees needed to protect their mission-critical applications, and they’re using clustering or other high availability technology," says Jerry Melnick, president and CEO of SIOS Technology. "A second takeaway is that even with those safeguards in place, the complexity and reliability of operations in the cloud offer particular challenges for HA solutions. This speaks to an important need for significantly more sophisticated HA solutions beyond what’s out there today. Next generation HA technologies will use machine learning-based intelligence to ensure reliable operations, reduce cost and offer deeper insight into cloud operations impacting service delivery and performance. These innovations will yield huge benefits in helping customers who rely on the services of critical applications."

The full report is available from the SIOS website.

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