A sales man of a firm that runs it’s hosting service out of a computer room here in Dublin was quoted by a local IT paper. He was talking about Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and the importance of availability:
"If the software being delivered is key to the business using it and has real value, then like everything else that is web-based, the critical term is availability".
I nearly choked on that one. The company is question has had at least two major outages this year … one related to networking failure and the other related to power failure. Of course, they’re "staffed by an extensive team of fully Cisco certified staff, ranging from CCNA. CCSP, CCNA and CCIE on a 24/7 basis, we can react to threats and issues as they arise". Funny, their senior network engineer (who is a good guy) isn’t a CCIE yet and he certainly doesn’t work 24 * 7. And I recommend the 2am test if you’re looking at them … knock on the door unannounced and randomly at 2am and see who, if anyone, answers the door.
By the way, they’re still at 99.87% availability according to third party metrics, a far cry from the much desired 99.999% or even perfect 100%.
EDIT:
I met one of the other salesmen from this hosting company today. I mentioned the CCIE claim and asked about that engineer becoming one. "Oh yeah", blah-blah-blah was the response, confirming the claim on the website. Strange, because the engineer in question hasn’t actually passed the CCIE exam yet! Don’t ya just love this sort of sell-at-any-cost (to the customer) behaviour?