The concept of uptime and downtime will be familiar to anyone who uses the internet. Every service provider strives to meet service level agreement (SLA) that determines the amount of uptime it will provide. Often, those SLAs are not met.
In online services, it’s normal to see uptime targets of 99.9 percent or higher. In business, SLAs tend to err more towards 100 per cent. Whatever your provider promises and whatever availability you expect, the reality may be very different.
Why 0.9 Matters
To many users, 99 per cent uptime sounds acceptable. But work it out – 99 per cent uptime means that your service is going to be unavailable for more than three and a half hours every month. 99.9 per cent uptime reduces the margin down to 4 minutes per month. That humble 0.9 makes a big difference.
In business, though, any outage is clearly going to present problems for clients and staff. Ideally, each service should be online and fully functional 24/7/365. If your clients can’t pay an invoice, or a colleague can’t close a deal, a mere four minutes of downtime has a big impact on profits.
Service providers for business users strive to hit 100 percent uptime, or as close to it as possible, so that critical services are always online. With the best will in the world, this isn’t always possible. Disaster is rarely predictable, and that means a small amount of downtime is sometimes a fact of life.
Results of Downtime
Downtime affects even the most robust email systems. Cloud computing has come a long way, but even very large cloud services do run into problems.
When systems are unavailable, staff cannot do their jobs properly, resulting in:
- Reduced productivity
- Inability to process orders, enquiries or other transactions
- A slew of undeliverable mail that irritates or simply confuses the sender
- Missed deadlines
- The introduction of workarounds to get around the problems presented by downtime
For example, consider email downtime. Users typically use their email accounts for 2.5 hours per working day. If employees cannot access their mailbox:
- Work ceases while the system is down
- The flow of communication is interrupted
- Other systems (telephone, live chat) begin to struggle under increased demand
- Users turn to third party email services to try to keep on working
Having a Contingency Plan
If you intend to adopt something like Office 365, it’s a mistake to assume it will solve all of your downtime issues. While the cloud is designed to provide high availability, it’s not the answer to every problem, and a contingency plan is therefore essential.
For protection against outages, a third party management solution is the best way to proceed. Mimecast’s Unified Email Management product is one example. It includes continuity services that can provide a genuine 100 percent uptime SLA, complete with medium term archiving and invisible failover during an Office 365 outage.
Contingency plans should be devised in order to protect against the effects of downtime. We looked at some examples above, but the risk is potentially greater. In fact, that the true effects are not known until the worst happens.
