Why More Businesses Demand Real 100% Uptime SLAs For Their Private Clouds

Trust is at an all-time low and truth isn’t what it used to be.  According to media commentators, fake news and alternative facts are what happens when too many politicians lie and too many service providers – from banks to utilities and telcos – don’t deliver on their promises.

So what value is there in a 100% SLA for your Ethernet?  On the face of it, there is a lot of value in effectively guaranteeing the continual uptime of a business-critical connectivity service.  The ubiquitous consumption of IT via the cloud, combined with the universal demand for anytime, anywhere access to data, means that 100% has never been so important.  The bigger question is, can you trust such an offering?

Service credits are scant consolation for a 24/7/365 business

Imagine ‘Telco A’ is offering you a 100% uptime SLA on a 100Mbps fibre product.  Regardless of whether their operations are built on a pristine, multi-billion dollar all-IP network, or an ageing heap of junk in somebody’s garage, that is a very big promise to deliver on.  You are entitled to ask, “what happens if they don’t?”

The answer is service credits.  These are the booby prize of telcoland; the equivalent of the £5 food voucher that the airline gives you when it cancels your £500 flight to see a dying relative.  Like the airline, the telco knows that it will occasionally fail, so this contingency is accounted for in the smallprint of its Ts & Cs.  The difference is that there has never been an airline to sell its tickets with an explicit 100% guarantee to get you to your destination at the advertised arrival time!

The result of all this is that businesses feel entitled to be cynical about 100% uptime claims.  Business customers don’t believe their telco providers will deliver on the headline promise; they resent the dishonesty and have no option but to factor this into their risk planning.

100% uptime – nine years and counting

100% isn’t easy, but it is possible.  By understanding how it really can be delivered, organisations can start to rebuild their trust in the concept, and the telco who provides it.

The key is resilience across the network; not just core elements but also the last mile connection and even the on-premise router too.

Luminet’s Always-On service is a fully managed primary and secondary failover service at layer 2 or layer 3, combining our Fibre and Wireless Pro/ Lite services to provide truly diverse last mile internet connectivity.  In resilience terms, this is vastly superior to using two connections that share a common medium.  In fact, the statistical probability of losing internet service for one minute when using a truly resilient Wireless /Fibre service (as in our Always-On offering, is just 1 in 67,000,000.  The independence of each connection extends to the router, adding a further layer of resilience, and removing a critical point of failure that is frequently of culprit of unplanned downtime in other configurations.

Into the edge and core of the Luminet network, where we have achieved 100% uptime for the last 10+ years, resilience is assured by virtue of our fully mirrored, redundant and diverse hardware and software, providing carrier class connectivity and compute for some of the world’s biggest brands and heaviest data users.  Independent tier 1 interconnects out to the internet provide the final layer of resilience, providing customers with the shortest possible distance to the internet, with no more than two hops to ensure low latency.

Our Always-On service uniquely moves across the same static IP addressing between primary and secondary connections and this is a major benefit for mission critical applications and services that require static IP addressing such as mail, SIP, video, VPN, ecommerce and trading.

Don’t settle for less than 100% – if that’s what you need

As the digital revolution holds more of UK plc in its grip, there are more organisations requiring zero downtime as a critical business prerequisite than those that don’t.  This sea-change in the importance of continuous connectivity has increased the importance of promoting credible 100% uptime SLAs over headline-grabbing gimmicks that don’t have the sufficient multi-layer resilience to deliver the goods.

Find out more about Luminet’s 100% Always-On service.

Contact me to “get connected”.