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While the vast majority of organisations hope for 99.9% uptime throughout the year, 57% of companies polled by CloudEndure say they had at least one outage in the past three months.

The survey, which quizzed 141 IT global IT professionals, found organisations are, in general, gaining confidence in cloud disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This is noticed in the key risks to system availability. The number one risk remains human error, followed by network failures and application bugs. Downtime of cloud providers fell from the third highest risk last year to #6 in 2016.

CloudEndure found the key challenges in meeting availability goals were insufficient IT resources, followed by budget limitations and a lack of in-house expertise. Yet in some cases, it is difficult to perceive how companies assess their uptime levels; 22% of organisations polled say they do not measure service availability at all.

More than half (54%) of respondents use the public cloud for disaster recovery target infrastructure, compared to private cloud (35%) and physical resources (11%). Of the public cloud users, more than half use AWS (53% and 26% overall). VMware vSphere (20% overall) was also highly cited, with Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure (10% overall) trailing.

84% of respondents say service availability is at least seven or higher out of 10 in terms of how critical it is to their customers. 38% say uptime is most critical – 10 out of 10 – while only 4% deem is as not critical. 19% say their goals for uptime is the magical ‘five nines’, or less than five minutes of outages per year, while only 3% say they have a goal of 99% uptime, or more than 88 hours down.

“While more companies continue to migrate large portions of their business data to the cloud, our survey findings are clear,” said Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure CEO. “Companies that invest in DR are likely to reap an upside in savings from the cost of downtime disrupting their operations.”

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of how the trend of cloud disaster recovery is shaping up in 2016. Writing in January Monica Brink, EMEA marketing director at cloud provider iland, explained: “Disaster recovery as a service [has] continued to claw its way to the top of CTO priority lists. With IT budgets tight and faster adoption of cloud in general, we’ve noticed a growing comfort level and confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.”