An industry-wide survey conducted by Foundry (publishers of CIO, Information Week and other publications) reveals just how demanding enterprise availability requirements have become, and how dependent these IT leaders are on PostgreSQL for handling the workloads of modern applications. The research, spanning 212 IT decision-makers across enterprises with 500+ employees, conclusively showed 91% of organizations using PostgreSQL who participated in the survey require a minimum of 99.99% uptime—that's no more than 4 minutes of downtime per month. Even more striking, 24% of the total respondents can tolerate no more than 30 seconds of monthly downtime, indicating that PostgreSQL has firmly established itself as the backbone of mission-critical systems.

The survey data paints a picture of an ecosystem in transition. With 37% of PostgreSQL deployments now supporting mission-critical applications and 30% standardized across most organizational workloads, the database has evolved far beyond its origins as an alternative to proprietary systems. This percentage is critical in revealing enterprise trust in Postgres as a reliable database management system, especially as when downtime occurs, the impact is severe—56% face delayed business operations, 49% experience support spikes, and 40% suffer brand trust damage.

Even with strong dependence on highly available systems, nearly half (47%) have adopted multi-region deployments, but many still depend on cloud-native solutions that create vendor lock-in and may not provide the flexibility needed for true resilience. Despite this, a surprising 82% of organizations express concern about cloud region failures, and 21% have directly experienced cloud failures firsthand in the past year. 

The developer community's overall response is telling: 79% of organizations are either evaluating or considering distributed PostgreSQL solutions within the next 12 months. This represents a massive shift toward architectures that can deliver the extreme availability requirements modern applications demand, and showcases that Postgres is capable of delivering such a guarantee. Multi-master replication (MMR), also known as active-active replication, is generating particular interest among the 47% deploying across multiple cloud regions as it offers the promise of active-active configurations that can maintain operations and help organizations meet demanding availability requirements.

For developers building the next generation of applications, these findings underscore the importance of thinking beyond traditional approaches to high availability and low latency. The era of accepting minutes of downtime for database maintenance or regional outages is rapidly ending, replaced by user expectations of always-on services. As PostgreSQL continues to prove its capability in mission-critical environments, the focus is shifting from whether it can handle enterprise workloads to choosing the best method for leveraging PostgreSQL while addressing the extreme availability that many modern businesses require.

Ready to dive deeper into the survey findings and explore solutions for extreme PostgreSQL availability? Download the full report to access comprehensive insights, strategic recommendations, and detailed analysis of enterprise PostgreSQL deployment patterns.