How To Achieve The Five Nines Of Uptime

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that downtime is bad news on the business front. Not only do down periods leave you open to major profit losses, but they also stand to lose you as many as 1 in 3 customers. It’s hardly surprising, then, that increasing uptime should be an ongoing priority for every business. 

Unfortunately, too many companies fail to consider the risks of downtime until it’s too late, and uptime doesn’t necessarily cross their minds, either. There’s also no guarantee of uptime for those that do make this a priority – it’s a goal that you’ll constantly need to strive towards. Yet, countless companies manage to get uptime right, with many even successfully achieving as much as 99.999% of uptime annually. 

Otherwise known as the five nines of uptime, this uptime goal is an undeniably worthwhile cause to strive towards. But what exactly does it mean, and how could you possibly achieve it yourself? Keep on reading to find out! 

What are the Five Nines?

When we speak about the five nines, we refer to an ongoing goal by businesses that aim to maintain at least 99.999% of uptime at all times. 

In order to achieve that, companies must ensure that they experience no more than 5.26 minutes of downtime annually, or no more than 26.28 seconds of downtime monthly. 

That’s a significant leap from 99.9% uptime goals, which allow for roughly 8.76 hours of downtime yearly. By aiming that bit higher, businesses can therefore significantly improve efficiency and customer retention overall. Not to mention the potential for cutting costs! 

How do you Calculate Uptime?

Once you have the five nines in your sights, you’ll want to know one key thing – how exactly can you calculate uptime to keep yourself within those tight parameters? 

On the surface, this might seem pretty simple. Surely your uptime is simply the amount of time your system has been functional? But, once you start delving into the details, you may find that there’s a little more to consider. Namely, you’ll want to extract something called an ‘availability percentage’, which requires you to take your total uptime period, extract any downtime experienced, and then divide by 100. 

While it isn’t essential, you may also want to consider other key metrics during your five-nines quest, such as mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR), as these will provide a proactive blueprint for improvements deserving of a 99.999% accolade. 

Common Setbacks to the Five Nines

The five nines might seem like a must-have goal, and often times, they are. But that doesn’t mean you can leap right up to the gates and expect to secure such high uptime right away. In truth, there are a few key setbacks that you can expect to experience during this uptime quest, and they include – 

• High costs: Systems that achieve such impressive uptime aren’t cheap, and require ongoing software investment and maintenance, often across multiple servers and software solutions. 
• Operational complexity: It’s not enough to set complex systems in place; you also need to test, plan, and monitor 24/7, making the five nines synonymous with operational complexity. 
• Overworked teams: Achieving the five nines is an ongoing quest that allows for very little team downtime, especially amongst IT specialists. The ongoing need to prioritize uptime also holds a real risk of oversight in other key IT areas like security and UX. 
• Inevitable blind spots: The quest to achieve the five nines can also result in certain business blind spots, such as the need to prepare for unavoidable disasters, as well as underlying latency issues. This can result in a so-called ‘watermelon effect’, where systems that appear green and healthy on the outside have hidden red issues underneath that simply don’t factor in uptime metrics. 

How to Overcome the Five Nine Obstacles

With such notable obstacles on the five-nine path, it’s easy to see why countless companies don’t ever achieve this lofty goal. Many don’t even try for fear that the risks outweigh the rewards. However, there are some key ways to overcome those obstacles if you do feel the five-nine pull, and they include – 

# 1 – Switching to Managed Cloud Hosting

Achieving the five nines of uptime requires IT infrastructure that’s often not practical or cost-effective to implement in-house. Luckily, it’s a goal that you can achieve with significantly more ease by simply considering managed cloud hosting solutions like Fresche’s IBM i Cloud solutions. As well as ensuring that your IT team is better able to focus on other priorities, outsourced cloud solutions are especially valuable here because they provide benefits that offset countless obstacles to 99.999% uptime, including – 

• Cost-effective solutions: Outsourcing your cloud management with a trusted company ensures the infrastructure you need to boost uptime, with significantly less initial outlay.
• 24/7 monitoring: You can’t achieve 99.999% uptime without monitoring your systems round the clock, but doing so in-house is rarely practical. Managed cloud solutions tend to offer 24/7 monitoring as standard, for increased uptime overall. 
• Outsourced experts: Not only does cloud hosting with experienced teams save you from specialized hiring in-house, but it also ensures your internal IT team is happier, healthier, and able to complete a broader range of tasks. 

# 2 – Setting Realistic Goals

Aiming towards the nine fives means setting your sights on lofty goals, but it’s also important to remain realistic. The simple truth is that 99.999% isn’t cost-effective or necessary for every business out there. In fact, the costs of achieving this high percentage of uptime don’t always pay off. 

Hence, realism matters. If the high costs of the five nines aren’t practical right now, then settle for 99.9% instead. Alternatively, if you’re dealing with high demand and a low tolerance for downtime, then by all means find a way to make the five nines work for you! 

The five nines of uptime might seem like an impossible goal, but if you’ve got your sights set on this accolade, then it may well be within easier reach than you imagine.