{"slug": "survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages", "title": "Survey Surfaces Significant HA/DR Dissatisfaction Following Outages", "summary": "A survey of 250 IT leaders in North America and the UK by SIOS Technology Corp. found that 66% experienced at least one outage lasting more than 10 minutes in the past year, yet only 7% test their high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) processes monthly. Only 56% are satisfied with their HA/DR platforms, and 75% plan to make DR a medium or high spending priority in the next 12 months.", "body_md": "TL;DR — Key Takeaways\n\n**HA/DR does not guarantee resilience.** Two-thirds of surveyed IT leaders experienced at least one outage lasting more than 10 minutes in the past year.**Testing remains a major weakness.** Only 7% test HA/DR processes monthly, while one-third test just once a year.**DR is becoming more strategically important** as infrastructure complexity, ransomware and AI-driven vulnerability discovery increase operational risk.\n\nA survey of 250 IT leaders from North America and the United Kingdom finds that despite having a high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) capability in place already, two-thirds (66%) had at least one outage lasting more than 10 minutes over the past year, with 23% experiencing three to four such incidents.\n\nConducted by SIOS Technology Corp., a provider of an HA platform, only 56% of respondents said they were either somewhat or very satisfied with their current HA/DR platforms.\n\nAt the same time, however, only 7% of respondents said their organization tests their HA/DR processes monthly, with one-third testing just annually. Another 22% said they did not know how frequently testing occurs.\n\nDave Bermingham, senior technical evangelist for SIOS, said much of the dissatisfaction with HA/DR solutions stems from that lack of testing. An HA/DR solution that is not regularly tested is just a theory rather than an actual solution.\n\nNot surprisingly, three-quarters of respondents (75%) label DR as a medium or high spending priority for the next 12 months, with 31% evaluating the role HA might play in patch management as the number of vulnerabilities in applications being discovered by artificial intelligence (AI) models continues to exponentially increase. Total cost of ownership (35%), reliability and performance (32%) and software license price (23%) were cited as the top criteria for evaluating a HA/DR solution.\n\nThe two biggest HA/DR challenges cited were complexity of configuration and management (44%), followed by integration with existing systems and applications (37%).\n\nEach IT organization will need to determine to what degree additional investments in HA/DR are required, but as IT environments become more complex, the odds there will be an outage only increase. Additionally, as the volume of cyberattacks continues to increase in the AI era, more IT organizations will view DR as their last line of defense in the event of, for example, a successful ransomware attack.\n\nThe challenge, of course, is that if the recovery process takes too long, the cost of paying the ransom is often less than the potential revenue an organization might lose. In general, IT teams should be able to recover an IT environment regardless of how much data there is within a day, said Bermingham. Otherwise, something is probably horribly wrong with their approach, he added.\n\nUnfortunately, too many IT teams are overly dependent on HA/DR workflows that haven’t been kept up to date. As more applications are added to an IT environment, each subsequent update to that application can have HA/DR implications. As such, there is now a greater need than ever to test HA/DR workflows and processes at least once a month if not more.\n\nThere should soon come a day, hopefully, when AI tools make HA/DR simpler to implement and maintain. In the meantime, however, IT teams would be well advised to hope for the best while always being prepared for the worst.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages", "canonical_source": "https://techstrong.it/featured/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages/", "published_at": "2026-09-02 12:00:08+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-02 12:25:51.930606+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy"], "entities": ["SIOS Technology Corp.", "Dave Bermingham"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/survey-surfaces-significant-ha-dr-dissatisfaction-following-outages.jsonld"}}