Communication issues have for the first time been named as the top cause of UK invocations in the UK in Sungard Availability Services’ annual Availability Trends report. Overall, the number of downtime incidents – in which staff were unable to work from their usual office or access business critical systems – remained largely the same, with only a five per cent decrease compared to 2014’s figures.

Despite the minor drop, these findings suggest that organisations are still not investing adequate resources in maintaining business availability for their people, as issues arising from communications-related failures jumped up by a third and now account for over 25% all total invocations. This year saw the highest level of communication problems since Sungard AS’s annual analysis began over two decades ago. And while invocations due to technology dropped by 71%, workplace issues, in which the office environment is rendered inaccessible, leapt by a substantial 37% – the biggest jump since 2009.

An invocation occurs when a customer calls to action business continuity, technology recovery or workplace recovery arrangements. Advances in managed, virtualised and dedicated IT solutions that have seen technology recovery declarations fall from a high of 109 in 2002 to just seven in 2015, have yet to deliver the same business availability improvements for the workforce. Yet, as organisations continue to adopt a more flexible and agile approach to work – with flexible hours, remote working and geographically distributed teams – lines of communications between colleagues and business departments have become increasingly central to sustaining day-to-day operations.

Executive vice president, global sales and customer services management at Sungard Availability Services, Keith Tilley, said, “Building and maintaining the kind of sophisticated continuity strategy needed to ensure availability for today’s modern organisations is a complex task, fraught with any number of potential pitfalls. Doing it alone is a near-impossibility for organisations that often lack the in-house resources and expertise needed to manage such an intricate and multifaceted problem."


Top causes of invocation (Source: Sungard Availability Services)

2015
1. 27% Communications
2. 16% Power
3. 14% Fire / 14% Flood

2014
1. 21% Hardware
2. 19% Communications
3. 14% Power

2013
1. 26% Power
2. 18% Hardware
3. 18% Other

2012
1. 34% Power
2. 19% Hardware
3. 13% Communications/Other

2011
1. 37% Power
2. 21% Communications
3. 16% Hardware

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