End of Software, The: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the On Demand Future

Making Yourself More Available

Providing high availability is not easy. Leading analyst firms estimate that enterprises wanting to eliminate the majority of planned downtime will need to spend approximately 3.5 times the cost of a standard application. Even if this amount is spent, analysts estimate that only 20% of applicants will actually achieve 99.5% availability. Given that our goal is to surpass that 99.5% benchmark by a comfortable margin, the odds don't look very good.

There are two fundamental ways to reduce the number of outage minutes. First, you can increase the time between outages—often called the mean time between failures (MTBF). Second, you can decrease the time to recover from the outage. Outages can be classified into five ...