UK businesses say enterprise app failures lead to reputation damage

Data management company NetApp's research has found that almost a quarter (23 per cent) of UK businesses jeopardise their reputation by not supporting business-critical applications with Flash. This is despite over half (53 per cent) of IT decision makers describing high performance storage as a priority business requirement.

The survey of over 1000 UK IT decision makers found that payment processing, customer relations management (CRM) and email marketing systems are the best supported and business-critical applications. Almost two in five IT decision makers use payment processing applications (40 per cent), and over a third use CRM (36 per cent) and email marketing applications (35 per cent) in their businesses. They see payment processing as the most important enterprise application to business continuity (31 per cent), followed by CRM (28 per cent) and email marketing (22 per cent).

In total, 30 per cent of those using payment processing, 24 per cent using CRM and 35 per cent using email marketing systems also say that these applications require consistently high performance levels. Despite Flash addressing these requirements, the technology is only used by 18 per cent to support payment processing, 17 per cent to support email marketing applications and 15 per cent to support CRM applications. In addition, almost a quarter of IT decision makers are not using Flash to support any applications.

Overall, more than half of IT decision makers (53 per cent) say they need high performance storage. They also believe that application outages within their business will cost them reputational damage. Almost two thirds of participants said customers would be frustrated if applications failed, and almost half said confidence towards the business would be lost. Two out of five also cited a loss of money as a potential consequence of application failure.

Laurence James, NEMEA Products, Alliances and Solutions Manager at NetApp says: "High performance data management is increasingly essential for UK enterprises and plays a key role in supporting business applications. This survey confirms that while the business value of Flash in terms of performance is understood by IT decision makers, education on its true value is required to reduce the disconnect between the business requirement and Flash adoption."

NetApp's survey with 1002 IT decision makers in the UK was conducted by Opinion Matters in May 2016. One in three of the respondents are 'middle managers', ranging from IT personnel to directors and owners of business. One third of the respondents represented 500+ employee enterprises in a broad range of industries from professional services to healthcare and manufacturing.