Enterprises can no longer slow down or stop―for even a minute. The costs are simply too high. Industry estimates put the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 a minute, with the range of losses between $140,000 and $540,000 per hour. As part of their efforts to keep this expensive downtime at bay―and to ensure the continued viability and availability of data flowing through enterprises, data managers are increasingly turning to strategies such as automation and cloud services. Still, they continue to have difficulties and acknowledge that keeping their data environments up-to-date is holding them back from delivering more capabilities to their organizations.

These are the findings of a new survey of 220 data and IT managers, fielded among the membership of the Quest IOUG Database and Technology Community. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. in partnership with Dell EMC. Most survey respondents were either database administrators or IT managers from industries including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, technology services, and government. One in five were from companies with 5,000 or more employees.

The survey revealed the following trends:

• Routine database administration and maintenance tasks are cutting deeper into organizations’ competitiveness than ever before. Strategies to address this overhead include database consolidation and adoption of cloud-based services.
• Information technology budgets are expected to receive a significant boost in the year ahead as data environments expand.
• Today’s data environments are highly diverse—residing on many platforms and requiring a diversity of approaches to ensure data resiliency and availability. Oracle is no longer seen as the sole vendor providing solutions and support.
• Data managers are bracing for ransomware attacks and are looking to secondary data centers and cloud deployments to ensure continuity.

Data managers responding to the survey point out that ensuring the viability and security of data is a process that needs to engage the entire enterprise. “Determine the main security risks of the enterprise information system,” one respondent advised. “After the information security assessment and risk classification of the network and application system, the main security risks of the enterprise information system can be determined, and the enterprise can choose to avoid, reduce, accept, and other risk disposal measures.”

Read the full report here.