Always On: The Cost of Downtime for Today’s Enterprises

Now more than ever, applications are the foundation of business, which makes high availability a necessity. Yet many businesses still may not realize the steps they should take to improve the “always-on” availability of their applications.

Today’s enterprise applications unlock a whole host of possibilities for businesses, enabling them to manage customer relationships, collect and analyze data, automate business processes and more. It’s an understatement to say that companies rely on their applications—these tools are what enable many organizations to compete and thrive in the modern digital economy.

In that regard, it’s only natural for application uptime to become a new point of concern. In today’s fast-paced business environment, applications are expected to be available on a 24x7x365 basis—high availability is no longer a perk, it’s a necessity. For many businesses, if their applications or databases go down, operations come to a standstill—and that can lead to some huge setbacks.

However, despite growing awareness about the consequences of downtime, many businesses still struggle to develop comprehensive recovery plans. Some don’t deploy the necessary tools and processes, others have untested plans that fail in their time of need. Whether it’s a planned outage, partially unplanned outage or totally unplanned outage, many businesses just aren’t adequately prepared.

Taking the Disaster Out of Disaster Recovery

As a company that produces software for developing applications and managing databases, the onus is partially on us to help our customers ensure the availability of their enterprise applications. While we can’t be there to address some of the causes for outages and downtime, we can empower our customers with capabilities and functionality that helps them navigate these tumultuous times.

This is why we made Replication Target Synchronization and Online Index Activation core focus points of the Progress OpenEdge 11.7 release—we want to give you the ability to minimize disruption and handle downtime with ease, whether it’s planned or not.

Brian Bowman, one of our Senior Principal Product Managers for OpenEdge, recently had the chance to talk to SD Times about disaster recovery and application downtime, and shared some specific details on how we help customers approach failover. If you’d like to read more about the topic, I’d suggest checking out the interview over on SD Times.