An Overview of Zero Outages Service: How Can it be Achieved

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When it comes to web hosting and collocation it is an absolute myth that there will be no downtime, and that goes for the more traditional web hosting and data center providers as well. It is common place for a typical managed hosting customer to have at least one outage in twelve months according to Gartner. The outages in question are mostly related to hardware failures and misconfiguration by the service provider. But, there are some customers who are lucky enough not to experience any outages at all even with complex managed hosting.

According to research, collocation facilities in America are build under Tier III standards which provides availability of around 99.99%, while in Europe, these facilities are built under Tier II standards and provides an availability of around 99.75%. While these are just numbers based on data gathered by many enterprise data centers, they don’t actually guarantee that you will not have an outage, which vary according to its tenant constituency.

The Perfect Cloud Experience

In order to win the trust of those who are skeptic of the cloud, data center operators are working hard to implement consistent management for their products. For instance, more and more data centers are working towards high availability of services which basically means that their systems could run to an availability of nearly 100%, meaning zero outages or a single outage lasting a total of just five minutes per year.

Those data center operators who are attempting to offer their clients with the perfect cloud need to first discover failures or potential failures in their systems as they arise, and then take the necessary steps to prevent them from causing further damage by occurring in the future. Apart from that, the root cause of every failure needs to be analyzed very carefully to make sure it doesn’t occur again. It should also be noted that most outages are often times the result of software issues instead of the cloud architecture.

Besides that, customers should not expect zero outages if they are using a public cloud which by definition, is in the public internet and therefore susceptible to downtime. This is the reason why many service providers offer no charge for using the public cloud. While using the public cloud does mean getting unlimited gigabytes of storage space and not having to pay for it, the caveat is you will have to do without the crucial support services.

Ending Note

While outages vary in magnitude, all of them have one thing in common, they cause can cause an organization a lot of money. In fact, according to a survey done by the Aberdeen Group back in 2010, outages of just a few minutes in a year can result in a loss of USD$70,000. It gets worse for ecommerce sites where one hour of downtime in production can result in a loss of USD 100,000, while banks can lose anywhere between USD $1 to USD $2 million in just one hour of downtime.