According to a recent Neverfail and Freedom Dynamics study, the number one cause of business downtime is software failure due to risky business and IT practices.

"Significant software application failure is more common than people imagine," said Jim Battenberg, product marketing manager with Neverfail. "The spark that sets these failures in motion can be as simple as user error, corrupt data or software bugs. Your employees can't work; customers can't place orders; business stops completely."
More than 1,200 IT professionals across the U.S., U.K. and other geographies were surveyed and examples of software applications that were deemed problematic by survey respondents include core business systems such as sales, call center and manufacturing; local or departmental applications like accounting, human resources and administration; Intranet, portal and collaboration systems; company website or any externally facing applications, e-mail systems and mobile e-mail access.

"What we found quite interesting was that larger organizations tend to have more problems with availability when it comes to core and line of business applications whereas smaller companies tend to have challenges with things like e-mail," said Martin Atherton, research director with Freedom Dynamics and also the author of the report.
He explained that with larger companies, core business systems tend to sit in more complex infrastructures and have several people using it.

"The more working parts, the more potential points of failure," Atherton added.

For smaller organizations, e-mail represents a more business critical application relative to larger organizations.

In terms of frequency of software failure, the report noted that 24 per cent of respondents said it was happening to them once a week, 32 per cent said once a month and 27 per cent said quarterly. When it comes to severity of these failures, two thirds of respondents said that failures were more of an annoyance to individual users.

Failures resulting in interruptions or delays in one or more parts of the business occurred to 18 per cent of those surveyed once a week, 23 per cent monthly and 30 per cent on a quarterly basis.

In terms of failures that result in tangible business losses such as financial repercussions, damage to reputation or legal issues, it happened to about 20 per cent of companies on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.

The end result is a direct hit on business productivity, increased IT overhead and knock on effects as delays impact processes, schedules and plans.

The survey also noted that 95 per cent of companies surveyed couldn't account for these outages in advance.
Atherton said that the first fundamental change to preventing software failure is simply improving the steps in the process that actual lead to developing software applications.

"Everyone has got these processes but the right people are not involved in them," he added.

A recommendation is to involve IT operations staff early in the project lifecycle as they have the experience and knowledge in how things work and fit in their corporate environment. This will highlight resiliency requirements and allow dependencies and conflicts with the existing infrastructure to be understood up front so plans and budgets can be set appropriately.

In the middle, there needs to be an appropriate level of monitoring so people get a warning when something is about to go wrong and on the front end, there needs to be appropriate protection in place particularly around core business applications that will have targeted well defined protection or resiliency.

Battenberg said that this resiliency is about keeping the end user continuously connected to mission critical applications.

Atherton added that companies shouldn't think that resiliency is all about protecting everything in their business.
"[Decide] what is important to your business and then apply the appropriate level of protection and resiliency to things that matter most to you," he explained.

He added that companies like Neverfail are going to have an interesting opportunity as there are plenty of chances to find the right people and the right companies to talk to about delivering the right level of protection for the right applications.

"Software failure is still a major issue that won't be fixed in my lifetime," said Atherton. "[Companies] need to acknowledge the problem of risky applications being launched and make the appropriate investments in important areas they feel they should be protecting."

To find out how CSI can help minimize your company's downtime, please contact our support line at 860-612-1047.