Continuity Software, a provider of uptime assurance solutions, released a new paper that highlights the most severe risks to data availability in the enterprise.

Continuity chief financial officer Doron Pinhas observes that the root cause behind these threats is reticence “to run most business-critical applications in a virtual environment” shared by “most organizations,” especially in the telecommunications and financial services industries.

“Despite ongoing efforts to eliminate IT business continuity and service availability risks,” he says, “organizations across all sectors still exhibit a significant number of issues that could lead to downtime, data loss, performance degradation, and violations of RPO and RTO,’ Pinhas says. “As organizations gain confidence in their cloud implementations and increase the number of business critical applications running across their virtual environments, we can expect a corresponding increase in HA and DR risks found there.”

Continuity has figures to back up its analysis. It says 58 percent of the risk is found in the storage layer, where it takes an average of 23 days to resolve a major outage.

In comparison, it found only a 17 percent chance that technical difficulties of similar proportions could stem from server issues, which are usually resolved in 19 days. The probability that virtualization may be the cause is less than 10 percent, and database errors only account for 5 percent of the total risk.

Data loss is by far the biggest threat to the enterprise, with a 41 percent cut of the pie. Downtime and response time delays coming in second, followed by performance issues with 17 percent.

The bottom line is that businesses, especially carriers and financial firms, must manage their data correctly. Many don’t need to be reminded, however: Verizon, for one, prides itself in the ability to tap into its massive stash of user info.