More than three quarters of businesses have not fully analysed the financial cost of a cloud outage, meaning they’re putting their business’s security at risk.

A survey by Veritas has revealed that a third of organisations only anticipate their services to go down for less than 15 minutes a month, yet figures show the average outage lasts 16 minutes per month.

Despite the majority of the 1200 business and IT decision makers saying they expect to move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24-months, two-thirds think keeping on top of outages is the responsibility of their cloud provider. More than three quarters think it’s the cloud provider’s job to protect workloads.

However, what they don’t consider is that the majority of SLAs only protect the infrastructure layer and they are not responsible for ensuring applications come back online when service is restored or data recovery.

If businesses aren’t prepared to take on some of the load when a cloud service is knocked offline, it could have pricey consequences for the organisation, unless the firm has an on-premise failover strategy in place, to backup apps and data, should a cloud service suffer an outage.

“Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business,” Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer, Veritas said.

“Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organization’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud. Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust and damage to brand reputation.”