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Neverfail launches downtime report of top 10 #outages of 2013

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Harmeet
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AUSTIN, USA: Neverfail, a leading global IT continuity management company, today launched its "2013 Downtime Report" which highlights the year's top outages.

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While the past 12 months saw several noteworthy outages, those at the top tipped the scale with the overall impact their downtime caused - in lost revenue, expansive reach and damaged reputations.

Major outages include:

#1: Microsoft Windows Azure's October 30th outage lasted for more than 20 hours due to a sub-component of the system failing worldwide, which caused downtime across the globe.

#2: Google's August 16th outage caused global Internet traffic volume to plunge by nearly 40 percent - and the site was only down for about five minutes.

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#3: On September 13th, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down for about three hours due to connectivity issues which affected Internet activity.

#4: NASDAQ's August 22nd outage, caused by a software bug, triggered a massive trading halt across the US for nearly three hours.

"Whether reality or perception, it seems as though there are more outages today than ever," said Martin Mackay, CEO of Neverfail. "With the consolidation in the cloud market - and imperfect human operators who are tasked with managing it all - we are going to keep seeing both small and large issues impacting not only a company's uptime, but consumers' user experiences."

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With services like Google's Gmail and AWS making the list, the impact of downtime is being felt by more than just internal users. Many companies today rely heavily on cloud services to provide their infrastructure, while more and more are turning to Google and other providers to run cloud-based email and SaaS.

"Given our heavy reliance on technology today, there is more at stake than ever before. Outages affect not only internal users, but a company's customers and partners - and impact revenue, credibility, trust, reputation and productivity," said Mackay.

For companies looking to protect themselves from outages in 2014, below are a few lessons-learned from the 2013 report:

* Have a failover plan; don't depend on cloud to always be there.

* Understand the dependencies and vulnerabilities that threaten availability and put in place plans to ensure full continuity to meet the real end-user requirements of constant access.

* Identify risks before they become a problem to make sure business continuity plans will work as expected should a failure occur.

* Connect the business service - and its importance to an organization - to the IT infrastructure which supports it.

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