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On June 8th, I experienced intermittent connectivity to several websites like Amazon, Twitter, and Hulu. Frustrated, I tried multiple attempts at refreshing my browser, but nothing improved. This outage was due to a failure at Fastly, which supports many of the web’s most popular sites (for more detail, see the report posted by Fastly). This incident highlighted the fragility of modern digital infrastructures, at any degree of complexity or style. Specifically, it re-emphasized the importance of a digital architecture with high availability to avoid costly downtime.
It’s important that your business identifies and implements proven principles of establishing a high-availability architecture. For example, if your business manages a private cloud, you’ll need to ensure that your resources possess the following four proven attributes of a highly available system to mitigate downtime:
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In many cases, your business might already use a popular platform like Salesforce or Azure for your cloud computing services. It’s up to you to decide your desired service level to codify in a service-level agreement (SLA). An SLA is a performance commitment that usually focuses on uptime or the percentage of time that a service is operational. As the table below shows, an SLA percentage of 99.999 offers only 5.26 minutes of expected downtime per year. Ultimately, it’s up to the business to determine the value of its time and then decide what SLA might be most cost-effective.
It’s important to be aware that SLAs can quickly become expensive. Therefore, your business should first decide how much downtime it can afford. Then, you can determine which SLA and supporting architecture your business will need.
These proven attributes of highly available system architecture will mitigate the risks of a potential disruption to your business. The Fastly incident proved that even a short disruption to your business’ mission-critical systems can have meaningful financial and operational consequences. Therefore, take the time to evaluate the most cost-effective way to mitigate downtime for your business, whether that’s re-negotiating your SLA or developing your own strategy using these proven principles to maximize the availability of your system. It’ll be well worth your time.
When you choose Opportune, you gain access to seasoned professionals who not only listen to your needs, but who will work hand in hand with you to achieve established goals. With a sense of urgency and a can-do mindset, we focus on taking the steps necessary to create a higher impact and achieve maximum results for your organization.
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