How much downtime is acceptable for a business?

[Draeger]

Quick question - My wife came home from work on Friday and mentioned her office had been unable to send or receive email since lunchtime that day. They contacted the company responsible for their email and were informed that they 'were aware of a problem and were fixing it'.

Throughout the weekend they were still without email and upon returning to work yesterday it still wasn't back up and running. A few phone calls later to the company concerned and they were still none the wiser, being told 'it will be fixed within the hour' each time they called. This morning she goes into the office to find they can send email but not receive any - not much use to a business!

Would you say this is an acceptable amount of downtime to experience for a business?

 

[Prophet]

Depends on the SLA's they have agreed to, however it's longer than it should be!

I recently resolved a company wide email outage by rebuilding their failed Exchange server from scratch, and still got it all back online within the day.

Different issues take varying lengths of time but this is way too long IMHO.

 

[tom_e]

That's far too long, all of our stuff is handled in house and anything like that is normally fixed within an hour or 2 at most it's by the end of the working day.

 

[AJK]

Would you say this is an acceptable amount of downtime to experience for a business?

No - fairly obviously - but what's your reason for asking? Of course there will (should) be an SLA in place between your wife's business and the email provider, which presumably they have now breached, but at the end of the day if they've suffered some kind of massive hardware failure, or have an ongoing and unknown issue that's out of their control... well, that does happen sometimes. Possibly your wife's business will now review their contract and go elsewhere, since the email provider have demonstrated that they can't maintain the agreed level of service...

 

[Armageus]

Would you say this is an acceptable amount of downtime to experience for a business?

Depends on the size of the business and the cost versus business risk of a different solution.

Almost everything can be improved on, with regards to reducing downtime, just depends on what cost is acceptable.

 

[Draeger]

No - fairly obviously - but what's your reason for asking? Of course there will (should) be an SLA in place between your wife's business and the email provider, which presumably they have now breached, but at the end of the day if they've suffered some kind of massive hardware failure, or have an ongoing and unknown issue that's out of their control... well, that does happen sometimes. Possibly your wife's business will now review their contract and go elsewhere, since the email provider have demonstrated that they can't maintain the agreed level of service...

Have to agree with all you and the other replies are saying. I think we all know and realise that sometimes things go utterly, completely wrong and there aren't any quick fixes. But almost 5 days without email access for a home user would be frustrating at best. For a business user I'd say its totally unacceptable.

Reason for asking was really just one of curiosity. The issue the business where my wife works has is that none of them are in the slightest what you could call 'tech savvy' so when things go wrong they can only call their providers and hope they have the issues resolved quickly and efficiently. No one in the office has any ability to really understand the ins and outs of the technology they use on a daily basis - all they know is it works and when it goes wrong they lift the phone to tech support and entrust them to sort it. As far as their service level agreement is concerned I think I'd get blank looks if I asked any of them in the office about it. Admittedly a failing on their part as they should be aware of its content but alas, this isn't the case.

I'll quite happily give the company concerned the benefit of the doubt, who knows - maybe their data centre has burnt down or something but this isn't the first time similar situations have arisen and I just wonder sometimes if they are having the wool pulled over their eyes simply because the staff in the wife's office don't know any better.

That said, what advantage would their email provider have in keeping them without working email for 4 or 5 days? It doesn't make sense to me for someone to do so just because they are being lax in their service delivery.

 

[AJK]

That said, what advantage would their email provider have in keeping them without working email for 4 or 5 days? It doesn't make sense to me for someone to do so just because they are being lax in their service delivery.

Can't imagine it's deliberate. Almost certainly some kind of technical issue that, for whatever reason, they can't resolve (failed backups, no alternate location, failure is in network infrastructure out of their control, etc.), and don't have procedures in place to work around. Giving your wife's business the runaround with repeated "fix within an hour" promises isn't particularly professional, but the fact they'd managed to restore some service this morning at least indicates that they're working on the problem. Is the provider a large one, or just some kind of local outfit that set up a few email accounts for small businesses? The smaller the provider, the less infrastructure they will have, and the less resilient they'll be, at the end of the day...

Obviously the situation should be followed up by both parties to make sure that the provider is still a suitable one to meet the business needs - and if it isn't, plan a migration somewhere else (though this can, of course, be difficult and expensive!) Not sure what the nature of your wife's work is, but if they're as technically inept as you suggest, it's probably not going to happen.

 

[Quartz]

The issue the business where my wife works has is that none of them are in the slightest what you could call 'tech savvy'

The tech aspect is actually irrelevant. It's a business management issue.

 

[HungryHippos]

I work for an email provider, and yes that much downtime is definitely not OK. Sounds like they've had a pretty major failure here somewhere.

OWA not work either?

The reason mail may not be received is that it could be getting queued up, or all the stuff that wasn't delivered is sat in a queue waiting to be processed.

 

[Draeger]

Can't imagine it's deliberate. Almost certainly some kind of technical issue that, for whatever reason, they can't resolve (failed backups, no alternate location, failure is in network infrastructure out of their control, etc.), and don't have procedures in place to work around. Giving your wife's business the runaround with repeated "fix within an hour" promises isn't particularly professional, but the fact they'd managed to restore some service this morning at least indicates that they're working on the problem. Is the provider a large one, or just some kind of local outfit that set up a few email accounts for small businesses? The smaller the provider, the less infrastructure they will have, and the less resilient they'll be, at the end of the day...

Obviously the situation should be followed up by both parties to make sure that the provider is still a suitable one to meet the business needs - and if it isn't, plan a migration somewhere else (though this can, of course, be difficult and expensive!) Not sure what the nature of your wife's work is, but if they're as technically inept as you suggest, it's probably not going to happen.

Spot on. I've asked my better half to look out their SLA although she isn't sure where to find it so I've suggested she contacts them and requests a copy. Probably not 'cricket' to name the provider here on the forums but I'd say they are a medium to large business concern themselves, primarily concerned with providing converged managed solutions to the business sector. And yeah - they sound as if they have had some sort of major failure somewhere along the line.

The tech aspect is actually irrelevant. It's a business management issue.

Absolutely agree - it's a combination of both but the fact that the senior partner in the firm seems to have a very lackadaisical attitude to things lately, isn't helping. Lawyers, eh?

The reason mail may not be received is that it could be getting queued up, or all the stuff that wasn't delivered is sat in a queue waiting to be processed.

My missus said that at about 12:55 this afternoon an avalanche of emails arrived - she's currently trawling through 300 odd of them in her inbox.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Longest continuous downtime my server ever experienced was 5 or 6 hours and it was partly the main connection to the network's fault and then the issues that come with the server suddenly going off line but remaining on when connection is restored, or something. was a long time ago. 4 days is totally unacceptable.

 

[suarve]

Are we talking some sort of dedicated email setup, or email hosted on some shared hosting?

 

[Caged]

Google Apps is dirt cheap and regularly achieves 99.99%+ uptime, which is an hour per year of downtime.

If you're paying lots of money for a small outfit to host your email, and you don't have some utterly mental requirements that means it can't possibly run on Google Apps / Office 365 then you're doing it wrong.

Likewise, if the business looks at £10 per user per month and thinks that's 'far too much money' to spend on email then they're probably the place that makes people use sandpaper to wipe with and actively hates their staff.

 

[Azza]

Last month we (local government organisation) lost mobile access to emails for ~3 weeks. Turns out BT essentially turned the line off. It took ~5 days for the reseller who provided the line to even get back with what the problem was. BT hadn't notified them or anything. Needless to say there were some unhappy people!