Sixty per cent of UK firms do not think service availability problems will cost them customers, new research suggests.
The research, conducted on behalf of SunGard Availability Services, polled 250 UK SMB senior directors.
The results revealed that respondents were more concerned about the impact lack of service availability could have on revenues (61 percent) and productivity (68 percent) than losing clients.
"In this context, we are talking about enterprise availability'," Keith Tilly, SunGard's UK&I managing director and executive vice president for Europe told IT Pro.
"It means people [whether staff, customers or suppliers], data, processing and the infrastructure that connects them all being accessible to support the business."
The point of enterprise availability' is the ability of information to flow freely in a business, he explained.
"Because every company now uses IT and [that] tends to be where the information flows, then the question is how we make sure that the IT is available and accessible for the people," Tilly said.
With businesses increasingly moving to the cloud, the service provider they choose is equally as important as the disaster recovery mechanism they use.
"Cloud computing is allowing more people to put more of their applications and therefore more of their business out into... a virtualised environment," said Tilly.
"Therefore, you need to be looking at the people you are asking to provide that cloud service and saying how available is your system?'
"The recent outages would suggest that Amazon does have a very good service for a certain level of application, but if you want a highly available application, you may need to look elsewhere."
