Application Availability Comes First, All Else Follows

Do you know which IT services IT managers value above all else?  N5 Networks asked over 300 of their customers to name the IT service without which they couldn’t imagine deploying an application. In January of 2015, they released the results of their ‘State of Application Delivery’ Customer Survey, stating that 40% of their respondents selected availability, making it the highest priority selection.  30% of their respondents, the next largest ranking group, selected security. In the year of some of the most highly publicized security breaches, availability trumped security. When your application isn’t available, all else becomes less important. 

We live in a connectivity-driven economy, where efficiency and productivity of businesses big and small presume the non-stop access to their software.

• Healthcare organizations rely on electronic health records to build comprehensive patient profiles and choose appropriate patient treatments
• Investment institutions rely on analytic tools to develop their strategies, manage their transactions and communicate with their clients
• Restaurants, car garages and beauty parlors rely on their applications to track reservations, customer payments, supply inventories and employee shift scheduling
• Cleaning companies and courier services use applications to manage their customer visits
• Retail stores use their applications to market directly to their customers and provide customer support

Temporary loss of access to business applications produces disruptions in business efficiency, disruptions in employee productivity and loss of sales opportunities. Network downtime is costly, and while there are no precise numbers  for how much downtime  impacts your business, current industry surveys of mid-to-large companies in the United States by Gartner and Avaya show that the average enterprise estimates an impact of approximately $5,600 for every minute of unplanned downtime in their primary computing environment. Yes, this is not a typo – Garter estimates that network downtime costs companies thousands of dollars - for every minute. Note that this is an average and that there is a large degree of variance, based on the characteristics of each business. The range of company costs is quite broad, ranging  from $140,000 to $540,000 per incident. 

Availability matters because when it isn’t there, everything else stops. Even if it doesn’t stop completely, the speed of business cannot afford the impact of the slowing down. Connectivity backup services provide businesses with operational alternatives to keep running during the times when, for whatever reason, primary connectivity services become unavailable. It’s the connectivity insurance policy that provides business continuity in an environment where standard connectivity options slip temporarily out of control. 

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