Continuity Software's 2013 Financial Services Availability Benchmark Study Reveals Almost Half of Respondents Not Meeting Service Availability Goals

NEW YORK, May 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Continuity Software^TM, the world's leading provider of service availability risk management solutions, today announced the results of its 2013 Financial Services Availability Benchmark study. The first of its kind, it reveals that while financial services organizations are obligated to establish and report stringent service availability objectives for mission-critical systems, they are actually among the worst performing in regards to meeting these goals. In fact, 41% of those surveyed acknowledged that they did not meet their service availability goals for mission-critical systems in 2012.

Continuity Software also announced today the results of its second annual 2013 Enterprise Service Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark survey. Based upon responses from IT executives across a wide range of industries, the results reveal that much like the financial services industry, they also have highly commendable service availability goals for mission-critical systems. Nonetheless, 32% of the organizations surveyed reported that they did not meet their goals.

"The Continuity Software 2013 Financial Services Availability Benchmark study and the 2013 Enterprise Service Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark survey offer executives responsible for their organization's IT, disaster recovery (DR) and/or business continuity an opportunity to see how their own goals and results stack-up in comparison to their peers," said Doron Pinhas, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Continuity Software. "More importantly, it points out the most common causes for outages, as well as presents the most effective strategies for ensuring service availability."

2013 Financial Services IT Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark Survey - Quick Summary of Findings:

• 89% of financial service organizations have an availability goal of >99.76% (less than 22 hours of downtime a year); 67% have a goal of >99.91% (less than eight hours); and 25% have a goal of 99.99% (less than one hour).
• 41% of the survey respondents did not meet their goals.
• 41% conduct complete DR tests at least annually; 26% don't ever conduct a complete test.
• 73% run mission-critical applications in a private cloud environment; 30% run mission-critical applications in the public cloud.
• 37% do not have any process in place to test reliability of private cloud systems.

2013 Enterprise Service Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark Survey - Quick Summary of Findings:

• 90% of business organizations have an availability goal of >99.76% (less than 22 hours of downtime a year); 68% have a goal of >99.91% (less than eight hours); 27% have a goal of 99.99% (less than one hour).
• 32% of the survey respondents did not meet their goals.
• The lowest downtime figures were reported by respondents from the transportation industry (3.7 hours average/year), followed by high-tech (4 hours), and business service organizations (4.2 hours).
• The highest downtime figures were reported by respondents from the healthcare industry (14.1 hours), financial services (8.9 hours) and public sector organizations (8.5 hours).  
• 71% run mission-critical applications in a private cloud environment; 33% run mission-critical applications in the public cloud.
• 40% do not have any process in place to test reliability of cloud systems.

Full copies of the 2013 Financial Services Availability Benchmark study and the 2013 Enterprise Service Availability and Business Continuity Benchmark survey can be found at http://continuitysoftware.com/serv/2013-service-availability-benchmark-survey-financial-services/ and http://continuitysoftware.com/serv/2013-service-availability-benchmark-survey-cross-industry/ respectively.

About Continuity Software

Continuity Software is the leading provider of service availability risk management solutions. Trusted by many of the world's largest and most successful companies, Continuity Software's award-winning software mitigates downtime and data-loss risks across the entire enterprise IT landscape, including the datacenter's disaster recovery, high availability (HA), and private cloud environments. With Continuity Software solutions, organizations can be confident that service availability, data protection and business continuity goals will be met or exceeded 365 days a year. For further information, please visit http://www.continuitysoftware.com, e-mail info@continuitysoftware.com, or call: +1-888-782-8170 (United States) or +972(3)6470888 (Israel). 

© 2013 Continuity Software. Continuity Software, RecoverGuard, DR Assurance, AvailabilityGuard and AvailabilityGuard/Cloud are trademarks of Continuity Software. All other brand and product names in this announcement may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

PR Contact:
Nicole Gorman
Corporate Communications
Continuity Software
+1-508-397-0131
nicoleg@continuitysoftware.com