The importance of Uptime. Why you should demand 100% uptime guarantee from all your suppliers

As organisations in every sector continue to move away from resource-heavy, on-premise legacy applications and hardware, the concept of ‘uptime’, or ‘high availability’, has become an essential factor to consider when choosing a solution or service partner. Today’s agile, businesses have become reliant on the concept of uptime and maximum operational performance.

Uptime is usually defined by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) through which the provider guarantees to supply the service at an agreed level of service availability. But, what exactly does ‘uptime’ mean?

What is ‘Uptime’?

Uptime simply means the number of minutes that any service or application is available or accessible during any given period. Typically, uptime is measured as a percentage with an annual uptime figure calculated as:

Total minutes in 1 year – Downtime minutes in 1 year    x   100        = Annual uptime (%)

         Total minutes in 1 year

But, uptime can be calculated at different intervals – monthly or quarterly, as well as yearly – which can lead to significant variations in the calculated percentage. To reduce this variation, uptime is usually measured on a monthly basis.

Three 9s is the absolute minimum uptime recommended by Touch. However, our Touch Call Recording Service offers 100% availability per month (not including planned maintenance).

What’s difference between ‘three 9s’ (99.9%) and 100% service availability?

When we think of uptime, we must also consider downtime, which can have a significant negative impact on your business. So, while 99.9% uptime might sound impressive, a more useful way to look at it is 0.1% of downtime.

The calculation shows that a downtime of 0.1% in fact means that your business is ‘offline’ for around 44 minutes every month. In this era of ‘always on’, that amount of downtime can equate to losses in revenue and reduced employee productivity. But, more importantly, it can equate to reputational damage and, ultimately, lost customers.

The calculation for annual uptime (and downtime) in absolute terms is a simple one, but the true cost of downtime is much higher, and can be represented as follows:

True cost of downtime (per hour) = Lost revenue + Lost productivity + Intangible costs (e.g., reputational)

According to a recent survey by Statista, 25% of survey respondents calculated the average hourly downtime cost of their enterprise servers as between $300,000 and $400,000[1]. If you are running to 99.9% service levels, that soon adds up.

This matters because another important consideration here is that this downtime is unpredictable – that is, you don’t know when such episodes may occur. That’s entirely different from planned downtime, which is under your control.

Consider a financial services organisation that cannot discuss transactions or deals because their call recording system is down (as we know, call recording is an integral component of many regulations such as MiFID II), or a contact centre that cannot process customer service calls that require an audit history or knowledge of pervious interactions, including personal data.

How does Touch Call Recording Service ensure optimum service availability?

At Touch, we strongly recommend that businesses demand a minimum service uptime of at least 99.9 % – and this should be measured on a monthly basis. However, we go far beyond this and guarantee 100% uptime to our customers.

That’s because Touch Call Recording Service has been built with the most robust, state-of-the-art IT architecture. Disaster Recovery is integral to the service set-up. The results of our investments speak for themselves: we have not had any downtime, ensuring that we back our promises to our customers.

We deliver continuous assurance using active, real-time continuous performance monitoring throughout the entire value chain of our own business on a 24x7 basis. Touch Operations Centre provides advanced monitoring and surveillance capabilities for our own business, which in turn ensures that you receive the highest levels of service uptime and quality.

Touch Operations Centre monitors both the Touch Call Recording Service, and the whole value chain to provide complete end-to-end visibility into our own operations, which translates into the highest possible quality of service, without interruption or error, for you.

Touch proactively monitors our own service assurance on a 24x7 basis, which means that you can rest assured you are always receiving the highest possible service availability. Thus, minimising cost, lost productivity, and reputational damage that downtime entails. We guarantee 100% service uptime, allowing you to get on with running your business.

To find out more, contact us today.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/753938/worldwide-enterprise-server-hourly-downtime-cost/