Data protection technologies and processes mean nothing unless objectives are not only established and aligned with business and IT objectives, but also measured and improved over time. As organizations increasingly shift to more hybrid and data-intelligent infrastructures, understanding real-world data protection and availability SLAs is becoming more critical for both IT practitioners and the vendors that provide supporting technology.
In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 378 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally responsible for or involved in data protection technology and process decisions for their organizations, specifically those pertaining to the ability to meet SLAs associated with applications/workloads. This research aimed to understand the current state of end-user deployments, identify gaps, and highlight future expectations.
Tolerance for downtime, downtime metrics, and real-world SLAs in the context of actual data loss were studied against the backdrop of availability technologies and methods, including hybrid environments.