Availability/Readiness/SLA

Why do our customers want guaranteed availability?

Nowadays, websites are often defined in specific business models. Consequently, downtime leads to immediate revenue loss and causes lasting damage to customer relationships—which, in turn, results in further revenue loss. Our customers often make requests like: "I want 99.9% availability." For us, this abstract requirement serves as the starting point for in-depth consultation; after all, availability is not the only relevant factor—the duration of an outage (Mean Time to Repair) and the frequency of failures (Mean Time Between Failures) matter just as much. In practice, one often deals with functional impairments rather than total system failures. Here, too, it is helpful to align expectations beforehand: At what point does a performance degradation become significant? What does the response look like? What’s more, complex setups often include components with lower availability requirements. The first step, therefore, is to identify core components and—based on the availability of individual components—calculate the total theoretical availability. For instance, four individual components with 99.9% availability result in a calculated availability of only 99.6% if all them must be operational simultaneously to secure revenue.

What does "calculated" mean in this context?

Availability figures are based on historical statistics and empirical data. We therefore guarantee a total availability of 99.8%. However, we often achieve 100% monthly availability. However, looking at the year as a whole, we recognize that we cannot guarantee 100%. We therefore determine the actual availability achieved by our components over the course of the year and calculate the total availability using standard formulas. We then specify this figure as the target value in our SLA. Our customers can rely on that we have achieved this figure multiple times and—thanks in no small part to our processes—are highly likely to achieve it again.

What if we don't meet this target?

If we fail to meet the SLA targets agreed upon with our customers, we offer service credits tiered according to the actual performance achieved. This demonstrates that we are serious about our goals.

That's where our offer comes in!

Together with our partners, we develop a strategy for your application that minimizes both the likelihood of service interruptions and recovery times. While outages cannot be prevented 100% of the time, what matters is preventing them from impacting your revenue. Our approach covers everything that needs to be considered in advance—from redundant components to operational processes.