Uptime: Is 96.5% The Same As 98%?

What percentage of the time are your servers/cloud operational? If this number is not 100% all the time, what is the percentage?

If you don’t know this number offhand, you aren’t alone. I would venture a guess that most organizations and businesses don’t really know exactly what their uptime percentage is most of the time. However, uptime percentage is a critical part of how efficiently your organization operates.

It’s important to note, our uptime goal for our private, on-premise datacenter is 100%.  That uptime goal is the same for our GO Private Cloud, which is part of our Virtual Datacenter service utilized by the vast majority of our DD-related organization and business clients. 

Why is Uptime Important?

With 42% of America’s workforce working from home full-time, today’s workforce is unique. Many of our staff are often not working the typical 9 to 5. As the pandemic has transformed our world to a new normal, the move to remote work, flex time and jobs that just require hours often outside what is considered the normal workday are now the rule rather than the exception. As a result of the shift in the workforce, as you consider your uptime calculation it should be adjusted to reflect a workday or 24 hours a day rather than a traditional workday. Naturally, if you have on-premise equipment, it is difficult to have 100% uptime because your equipment will need maintenance on what is likely a regular basis, and having redundant systems that can be utilized during updates and/or other downtime/outages can be a very large investment.

How Can Increased Uptime Increase Productivity?

As an organization, you most likely strive to employ high-performance staff. These members of your organization probably not only expect 100% uptime, they demand it. If, on the other hand, employees are conditioned to accept mediocre access or routine interruptions, they will know no difference. Gaps in access, or downtime, have a negative effect on productivity. In turn, these issues can affect performance, morale, recruiting, retention, and revenue. The negative results can be devastating, especially over the long term.  Basically, you might not see an immediate impact, but it is the “death by a thousand cuts” scenario. If you are reading this article, you likely want the best for yourself and your entire organization or business. It is certainly what we want for all our clients and you.

What is an Acceptable Uptime Percentage?

The answer to this question is simple. An acceptable uptime percentage is as close to 100% as possible. Realistically speaking, anything less than 99.5% makes it difficult for organizations to deliver what they promise to both those they serve and their employees … reliability.

This is the opposite of how most of us grew up. Anecdotally, when I was in school, if I got a 96 on a test I would have been over the moon. I know my parents would have been crazy happy! This doesn’t necessarily translate to an amazing grade when it comes to server/cloud uptime.  For example, an organization has a 96% average on uptime. For this example, we are going to allow maintenance 4 hours daily between 12:00 pm – 4:00 am. So, for 20 hours out of each day, the organization is running at 100%.

• Hours per day 20 x 365 days in a year = Total for the year 7300 hours
• 100 % = 7300 hours
• 96 % = 7008 hours

What does all this mean? If your servers/clouds are scoring out at 96% uptime, then your organization lost 292 hours in a year. That is over 12 days of downtime. Out of 7300 possible hours is this really a big deal? In an organization of 100 people, estimate that of the 292 hours of downtime, your team was affected 75% of the time or 219 hours.

Seems like small potatoes, right? When you extrapolate that for each employee, however, the results are surprising.  If there were 219 hours downtime x 100 employees it equals an astonishing loss of 21,900 hours a year. When you place a dollar figure with those hours it becomes even more real. Let’s assume the average employee costs $22 per hour (including benefits). When you multiply $22 x 21,900 hours lost = $481,800 total productivity lost. When you convert lost hours to dollars, it will get your attention very quickly.

Boost Team Efficiency and Productivity

As an organization, we know besides downtime with servers/clouds there are other IT issues that take away from a teams’ ability to be efficient. So that number of $481,800 is not the only thing you have to be concerned about with productivity. In our next article, we will share ways of how to improve your overall uptime on your servers/cloud.

Contact us to analyze your own DD-related organization or business uptime and see how we can help you regain lost productivity or even help you migrate to a solution that moves you at or close to 100%.