fbpx
Iris Zarecki

Is It The End of “Five Nines” Availability?

  • July 21, 2015
  • 2 min read

About Continuity™

Continuity™ provides the industry’s ONLY storage & backup security solution, to help you protect your most valuable data.

Read more

In the aftermath of the trio of high profile outages that hit NYSE, Wall Street Journal, and United Airlines earlier this month, some industry analysts raised the question of whether such outages are inevitable in today’s IT environment.

In the days of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), it was common for phone companies to offer 99.999% reliability, which allowed for about five minutes of downtime a year. As the WSJ article states, today’s networks are far less expensive, infinitely more capable and nowhere near as reliable. The NYSE outage lasted about four hours, or nearly 50 years of allowable downtime using the “five nines” standard.

Today’s reliability problems are a reflection of the complexity and interdependency of computer systems, the pace of change, and insufficient organizational and cultural practices, according to former NYSE Euronext CIO Paul Cassell, now CIO of Pico Quantitative Trading LLC.

Our own survey results show that even “four nines” is a tough goal. As many as sixty three percent (63%) of the respondents that have this goal for their critical systems have not been able to meet it.

What do you think?

Is “five nines” availability a realistic expectation in today’s environment?

Respond to our poll question and see what other readers think.

Talk To An Expert

It’s time to automate the secure configuration of your storage & backup systems.

We use cookies to enable website functionality, understand the performance of our site, provide social media features, and serve more relevant content to you.
We may also place cookies on our and our partners’ behalf to help us deliver more targeted ads and assess the performance of these campaigns. You may review our
Privacy Policy I Agree