NEW YORK, January 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Study Points to Storage Misconfigurations as a Primary Source for Downtime and Data Loss Risks  

Continuity Software^[TM], the world's leading provider of service availability risk management solutions, today announced the results of its 2012 Continuity Risk Benchmark study. The study reveals the most severe and potentially damaging downtime and data loss risks to today's business organizations can be found in the data storage layer, followed by the server and cluster layers.  The study further reveals that today's telecom and financial services industries are at the greatest risk for extended downtime and permanent data loss.  

"The benchmark results show that despite ongoing efforts to eliminate IT business continuity and service availability risks, organizations across all sectors still exhibit a significant number of issues that could lead to downtime, data loss, performance degradation, and violations of RPO and RTO," said Doron Pinhas, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Continuity Software.  

Pinhas continued, "It may come as a surprise that the number of high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) risks identified in the virtualization layer was relatively low.  However, this is due to the fact that most organizations are still reticent to run their most business-critical applications in a virtual environment.  As organizations gain confidence in their cloud implementations and increase the number of business critical applications running across their virtual environments, we can expect a corresponding increase in HA and DR risks found there."

Quick Summary of Findings:

• Distribution of Identified Risks by Functional Area: Storage 58%, Server 17%, Cluster 11%, Virtualization/Cloud 9%, and Database 5%
• Potential Impact: Data loss 41%, Downtime and RTO (Response Time Objective) Violations 25%, Performance 17%, Other Risks 17%
• Average Days to Resolution by Functional Area: Storage 23 Days, Server 19 Days, Cluster 17 Days, Virtualization 9 Days, Database 7 Days

The 2012 Continuity Risk Benchmark is based on real world customer data collected by Continuity Software's RecoverGuard^[TM] automated vulnerability monitoring and detection software.  A full copy of the report can be found at http://www.continuitysoftware.com/it-continuity-risks-benchmarks.

About Continuity Software       


Continuity Software is the leading provider of service availability risk management solutions.  Trusted by the world's largest and most successful companies, Continuity Software's award-winning software mitigates downtime and data-loss risks across the entire enterprise IT landscape, including the datacenter's disaster recovery, high availability (HA), and private cloud environments. With Continuity Software solutions, organizations can be confident that service availability, data protection and business continuity goals will be met or exceeded 365 days a year.  For further information, please visit: http://www.continuitysoftware.com, email: info@continuitysoftware.com, or call: +1-888-782-8170 (United States) or +972 (3) 6470888 (Israel). 

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© 2013 Continuity Software.  Continuity Software, RecoverGuard, DR Assurance, AvailabilityGuard and AvailabilityGuard/Cloud are trademarks of Continuity Software.  All other brand and product names in this announcement may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

PR Contact: 
Nicole Gorman

Corporate Communications 

Continuity Software

+1-508-397-0131

nicoleg@continuitysoftware.com