Fed IT workers vote no confidence on data center uptime
Forty-two percent of federal IT workers surveyed by MeriTalk said downtime left them unable to do their jobs.
What: "The Drive to Thrive: Ensuring the Agile Data Center," a MeriTalk survey of more than 300 agency field workers and federal IT professionals familiar with their agencies' data centers.
Why: Agencies rely on their data centers for a wide range of operations, but issues related to managing downtime erode the confidence of IT workers.
In MeriTalk's survey, which was underwritten by Symantec, 80 percent of federal IT workers said data center reliability is a top agency priority, but 42 percent said downtime left them unable to support their missions.
Federal field workers noted that real-time information access was crucial to their work and saved them 17 hours per week. That equates to about $32.5 billion in annual productivity savings. In the past month, 70 percent of agencies experienced downtime of 30 minutes or more, and 90 percent of field workers said the downtime affected their ability to do their jobs.
Thirty-six percent of field workers gave their IT departments a grade of C or lower for recent downtime management, and just 29 percent said they believe their IT departments fully understand the effect that downtime has on their ability to work.
Verbatim: "Nobody's going to give up their umbrella if the roof keeps leaking." -- MeriTalk founder Steve O'Keeffe