StackSafe Inc., a provider of pre-production staging, testing and analysis solutions for IT operations teams, has announced the findings of its IT Ops Research Report: Downtime and Other Top Concerns -- revealing that six out of 10 companies view application changes as a leading cause of downtime.

The study of over 400 IT operations professionals, conducted by Research Edge Inc., an independent, third-party research firm, also shows that the more application changes an enterprise makes to the operations environment, the more likely downtime incidents will occur and the greater number of IT staff hours will be required to repair these incidents.

Downtime represents a key concern for companies of all sizes according to the study. IT operations professionals from small, medium, and large enterprises - ranging from 750 to over 10,000 employees -- listed downtime as their top concern when managing multi-tier applications. Two company profiles in particular are most concerned with downtime when compared to average companies -- enterprises that rely on e-commerce applications and financial services companies. 

"This study clearly shows that changes to multi-tier applications are the leading cause of downtime in the IT operations environment," said Loren Burnett, President and CEO of StackSafe. "We're seeing that the companies making the most changes experience the greatest number of downtime incidents - even though minimizing downtime is a top concern. Unfortunately, we doubt the number of changes will decrease anytime soon.

The reality of complex, multi- tier applications combined with a dynamic IT environment to support Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), as well as security and regulatory requirements means that changes will only increase."   

The companies that make more than 150 changes per year provide the greatest depth of insight into the link between changes and downtime.

Companies of this type average 22.3 downtime incidents per year - as compared with the report average of 15 incidents - and reported losing 50% more hours of IT labor due to downtime (3,086 hours per year) than average companies. Additionally, these companies are more likely to cite inadequate staging and testing as a primary cause of downtime incidents. 

These findings support recent research by Gartner regarding the need for better testing to reduce downtime and improve application availability.

To meet business SLA demands, increased rigor in testing is required prior to production implementation," said Donna Scott, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner. "Investing in integration testing across applications, infrastructure and management processes/procedures can improve availability levels as much as 40% through 2011."