Of those surveyed, 82 percent of CIOs admit that they are unable to meet their organization’s need for immediate, always-on access to IT services, according to the Veeam Data Center Availability Report 2014.

This availability gap has immediate costs: application failure costs enterprises more than $2 million a year in lost revenue, productivity, opportunities and data irretrievably lost through backups failing to recover. These costs will only increase as the global economy requires enterprises to work with partners, customers and stakeholders across time zones, pressuring data center assets to be always-on no matter the location. With emerging markets predicted to generate 40 percent of global growth within the next 15 years, missing global opportunities due to downtime can cause irrevocable damage.

“The availability of IT is more important than ever. Yet businesses globally are being failed by an IT industry that has led them to believe they have to accept downtime,” says Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam. “This isn’t acceptable. Organizations can’t afford to lose millions of dollars from IT failures, nor can they continue to gamble with data availability. The good news is things are set to change. Organizations just need to throw away what they’ve been told for years about availability and demand better. If every organization does this, then in five years application availability will become a redundant topic as consumers and employees across the planet access what they want, when they want it.”

Key findings of the report include:

■ 82 percent of CIOs said they cannot meet the need of their business. More than 90 percent of CIOs are under pressure to both recover data faster, reducing the financial impact of unplanned downtime, and also back up data more often, reducing the risk of data loss.

■ The reasons CIOs are under pressure include more frequent, real-time interactions among customers, partners, suppliers and employees (65 percent of respondents); the need to access applications across time zones (56 percent); increased adoption of mobile devices (56 percent); employees working outside regular hours (54 percent); and an increasing level of automation for decision making and transactions (53 percent).

■ Unplanned application downtime occurs more than once per month (13 times per year).

■ Unplanned application downtime costs an organization between $1.4 million and $2.3 million annually in lost revenue, decreased productivity and missed opportunities.

■ One in six backup recoveries fails, meaning that with 13 incidents of application downtime per year, data will be permanently lost at least twice. This lost data costs enterprises a minimum of $682,000 annually.

■ Organizations are also risking between $4.4 million and $7.9 million of lost application data from downtime incidents each year.

Businesses are already calling for greater availability. However, IT departments are missing the recovery time objective (RTO) their businesses demand for mission-critical data by more than an hour and are more than 2.5 hours away from the always-on standards set by modern availability solutions. They are also missing the required recovery point objective (RPO); i.e., how often data is backed up, by 1.5 hours, and they are 4.5 hours away from modern always-on standards.

“Make no mistake, we are already in the era of the Always-On Business,” adds Timashev. “To keep pace, enterprises need entirely new types of solutions that enable 24/7 availability in a way that legacy data protection and backup products could never do. This means high-speed, guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server when needed. It means leveraging backup data and environments to test the deployment of new applications, mitigating the risk of failure. And it means complete visibility, with proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before they affect operations. CIOs clearly recognize this, with 78 percent planning to change their data protection product in the next two years in order to get the availability that they need. As a result, the availability gap will start to become a thing of the past.”

Survey methodology: The Veeam Data Center Availability Report 2014 is based on a survey conducted online among 760 CIOs of companies with more than 1,000 employees across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia and Singapore. Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization, directed the survey on behalf of Veeam.