4 nines availability is equivalent to only 4.4 minutes of downtime in a month!
Here are 3 challenges that keep people from meeting customer expectations for service availability:
1. Lack of automation
You have to ensure that you can detect and repair something inside the 4-minute window.
This means that you have:
- 30 seconds or so to figure out that you have an issue,
- a minute or two to fix it, and then
- a minute or two for things to normalize again.It's impossible to meet this baseline if you're not automating.
2. Too many incidentsIf you handle incidents manually, they will take you an hour or two.
And that's going to blow your budget for the entire year.
Usually, people give themselves a red X for that month and then try to get green checks for every other month.
But that doesn't mean your customers are any happier.
3. People’s expectations
The better you do, the better people expect.
Do you carry 2 cell phones on 2 different networks so that if one goes down, the other will work?
You probably don’t, right?
But when I first got an iPhone, I had another phone just to make calls because the iPhone was great at everything other than the cellular network.
It's great now, but it took time.
Similarly, people's expectations get built around the availability of the devices they use.
