Application Changes Irk IT Operations

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AS OF 7/4/2008 8:24PM EST

Application Changes Irk IT Operations
By David Worthington

July 26, 2007 — Costs quickly mount when multitier applications fail in valuable production environments, making it no small wonder that minimizing downtime caused by application changes is the top concern among IT operations professionals, according to a July 2007 report published by StackSafe, a startup that provides a virtualized staging and analysis platform.

Downtime ranked as the top IT operations challenge among companies of all sizes surveyed; smaller enterprises with a minimum of 750 employees reported fewer incidents of downtime than medium and large enterprises. IT professionals from large enterprises reported the most significant cost in staff hours: 3,184 per year, compared with 2,115 hours for the average company.

Six in 10 respondents cited application changes, such as software patches, new releases and custom code, as the primary source of downtime. Connectivity problems and hardware failure were less problematic, rated 21 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Emergency patches and fixes were the specific application change causing the most problems for organizations.

Computer-related, e-commerce and pharmaceutical firms experienced more incidents of downtime. Companies identifying e-commerce as their primary business and organizations prioritizing CRM both noted downtime as their top concern.

The report draws a strong correlation between the number of application changes companies make, and the incidents of downtime in those organizations. Companies that implement more than 150 application changes per year experienced an average of 22.3 incidents of downtime per year at a cost of 3,086 IT staff hours, while the average company has 15 incidents at a cost of 2,115 hours.

Stacksafe president and CEO Loren Burnett explained that the top concerns of IT operations are misaligned with how budgets are allocated. Security was the highest IT expenditure driver, followed by minimizing downtime, troubleshooting and managing performance.

StackSafe commissioned market research service Research Edge to conduct the survey. Research Edge used a targeted random sample of 400 IT professionals from a panel assembled by research provider Greenfield Online; only IT decision makers from companies with greater than 750 employees were qualified for the survey. Statistical analysis was used to establish the validity of the study and its results.

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