Blame the software for IT failures

According to Managed Objects, a company that sells software service management software, software is at the root of all evil.

Managed Objects has conducted a survey of 200 IT managers in the United States, and report that 61% of those IT managers say that software is generally the culprit for IT downtime, compared to 21% who blame hardware. (The rest don’t know if it’s hardware or software.)

Further, according to Managed Objects, IT managers are more likely to blame software for IT failures “if their organization relies heavily on home-grown applications.”

To quote:

Complicating the battle to reduce downtime is the pervasiveness of revenue-driving homegrown or custom applications within large companies’ infrastructure, which according to survey results can represent up to 90 percent of some organizations’ application mix. Within organizations relying on more homegrown applications than off-the-shelf offerings, more than 80 percent of respondents blamed software as the primary cause of most outages.

These findings are particularly significant when placed against the backdrop of results that showed just how often application downtime occurs. 82 percent of surveyed organizations reported application outages in the last year significant enough to impact their businesses, at an average cost of more than $10,000 per hour and an average duration of between three and four hours.

Bear in mind, of course, that it’s in Managed Objects’ best interest to make this issue look dire. The company wants to sell you tools designed to measure application uptime, enforce software service level agreements and implement end-to-end software management. This study was done as part of their marketing push around a new product called Application Configuration Study, launched last week. Plus, a survey of only 200 IT managers constitutes a pretty small sample, and it’s unclear how the study defines an IT failure, if it does at all.

Even so, the results are interesting, and accord with my own observations. Hardware failures in a modern data center are fairly rare. If proper precautions are taken (such as using network load balancers, fault-tolerant devices and redundant systems), a device fault should not result in an “IT failure” at all.