UK companies 'not prepared' for possible cloud outages

Around 77 per cent of UK companies are failing to prepare themselves for possible cloud outages, according to a recent study conducted by Veritas Technologies'.

Based on a survey of 1,200 businesses, the study revealed that three quarters are yet to effectively evaluate the costs they could face should an outage occur, with many failing to understand their own responsibility in ensuring their business applications are protected in such events.

Specifically, 59 per cent of companies believed dealing with interruptions in service was the primary responsibility of their cloud provider, while 83 per cent believed their service provider was responsible for making sure their company data was protected against service outages.

Additionally, the research found that 38 per cent of companies expect less than 15 minutes of downtime each month, despite figures suggesting an average of 16 minutes is experienced by UK companies.

Commenting on the findings, Mike Palmer, executive president and chief product officer for Veritas, suggested that organisations across the country appear to have failed in understanding how they could be affected by cloud outages, as well as their responsibilities in recovering following an outage event. "Recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business," he said.

"Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organisation’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud," Mr Palmer added. "Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust and damage to brand reputation."

Despite these concerns, The Truth in the Cloud study demonstrated that 99 per cent of decision makers within IT departments are certain their company will move their systems to the cloud within the next 12 to 24 months, with 27 per cent stating that they expect all of this new infrastructure to be outsourced to public cloud.