| | June 20178CIOReviewFrom Good to Great: The Path to Improved System and Application Uptime We can thank SaaS providers for raising the bar with regard to system and application availability. Today, while 99.5 percent system and application uptime are considered "standard" by most cloud providers; this equates to 3.42 hours of downtime per month--a significant speed bump in today's always-on business environment. Just ask any unlucky airline passenger who becomes inadvertently stranded for hours due to a system outage!Increasingly this "min" bar is being raised to 99.99 percenta figure which equates to 38 minutes (or less) of downtime per month. The question many IT organizations face: How to meet this uptime imperative without significantly increasing costs? Ensuring the right disciplines (governing people, process, tools) are in place is a good place to start. Start by Selecting the Right SLAHigher level SLAs translate into higher costs. Not all workloads require the same level of SLAs; to this end, it's important to balance business requirements with fiscal responsibility. When and how do you need your system or application to be available? Keep in mind availability requirements may vary on the type of application and depending on the time of day, month or year, and whether access is across multiple geographies and overlapping time zones. What are the financial/compliance implications of availability? Are there other dependencies with other upstream or downstream systems? If your company is a provider of SaaS or hosting services, group your applications by criticality based on these considerations. If you are relying on SaaS providers for your internal needs, make sure you know what the SLAs are and how they are calculated--as well as the calculation of penalties. Unify Monitoring for Streamlined Detection and TroubleshootingOperating in the +99.99 percent uptime world where time is of the essence places tremendous importance on problem identification and alerting capabilities to enable agile support and system/application optimization. Monitoring is about finding issues before they become problems and fixing them before users are impacted. In a 2015 survey, industry analyst firm Forrester found 91 percent of senior IT decision makers at large North American firms responsible for application, network and/or service monitoring technology, cited problem identification as the primary area that needed improvement. Half of these respondents reported that 90 percent of their IT issues take more than 24 hours to resolve. As a provider of IT services, there is nothing worse than your internal or external customers calling the help desk to tell you the system is down and you didn't know it. Monitoring systems provide a view of the health and availability of applications and overall performance, the underlying infrastructure that they depend on, and detailed reports and analytics that can help with troubleshooting. By Mark Mincin, EVP & CIO, Epicor SoftwareIN MY OPINIONMark Mincin
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