Microsoft's Office 365 Uptime Exceeds 99.9%

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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For the first time, Microsoft has made the figures for Office 365 uptime available to the public and the numbers are impressive. The average uptime for the past four quarters hovers around 99.9%, a pretty respectable showing and little wonder why Microsoft made the findings public.:cool:

Gartner analyst Matt Cain said this move is "long overdue" because until now prospective Office 365 customers had a tough time getting this data, which is critical for making an informed decision on whether to sign up for the suite or not.
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I call BS on this. We've had outages on both the client and admin parts of Office365, as well as changes on Microsoft's side that caused Free/Busy and the ability to move accounts to the cloud for over two weeks. Of course their answer to that was to rebuild our end of the connection, which hadn't changed.

I can't wait for our EA to expire next year and move the people back out of the cloud.
 
"the cloud is magical"

"the cloud will do everything you want, it will solve all your problems remotely"

hah -- cloud services are nice - but they aren't something I would put mission critical apps or documents on. Are you willing to risk losing 100,200,500K dollars a day because your cloud is on the fritz?

I like the dropbox implementation -- it's on my hard drive, AND on the cloud, auto syncing when available, but I can still access everything I need even if I'm holed up in a cave somewhere.
 
Boasting about three nines for something that's supposed to replace a local app sounds rather bad to me.

Those percentages are calculated based on the number of minutes in each calendar month and the number of minutes in which the Business, Government and Education editions of Office 365 were available worldwide.

"Individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns," the blog post reads.
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Even better is boasting about three nines, then saying individual users might get worse...
 
Neb said:
Even better is boasting about three nines, then saying individual users might get worse...
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That's to safeguard themselves against armchair commandos with anecdotal experiences, just like in these forums where you see guys claiming Brand X is utter trash because they had their first and only product from them come in DOA, thus their entire product line and all units are suspect.

People understand averages, individuals do not.
 
Neb said:
Boasting about three nines for something that's supposed to replace a local app sounds rather bad to me.



Even better is boasting about three nines, then saying individual users might get worse...
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I swear, do people post silly stuff like this to just hate? You ever heard of YMMV? You ever OC something?

An above 99% uptime is impressive, especially with a still fairly new product. Everytime ive had to use it for school it has always been working and have had no complaints so far.
 
Trimlock said:
I swear, do people post silly stuff like this to just hate? You ever heard of YMMV? You ever OC something?

An above 99% uptime is impressive, especially with a still fairly new product. Everytime ive had to use it for school it has always been working and have had no complaints so far.
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I'm looking at it from a business perspective requiring high availability. Microsoft is advertising this product as a replacement for locally hosted solutions where high uptime is naturally expected. With that perspective, an "above 99%" uptime is almost worrying, depending on the situation.

Also, thanks for calling my post silly, I figured it was due to the reasons Neurofreeze posted though he didn't take nearly such an condescending tone :p
 
Sorry, didnt think silly would of came off as condescending.

Also for something over the net, nothing has 100% uptime, there is always something somewhere that can kill your perfect score somewhere.
 
It was required by the NSA to have high uptime of the system ... all that data isn't going to read itself :p ... takes lots of time to sift through that many Word files, Excel Spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations :D
 
Trimlock said:
Sorry, didnt think silly would of came off as condescending.

Also for something over the net, nothing has 100% uptime, there is always something somewhere that can kill your perfect score somewhere.
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The ever heard of YMMV and ever OC something comments are what kinda threw me off, because OC'ing a personal computer has very little to do with a service that businesses depend on. While nothing has 100% uptime, the difference between 99% (1.83 days of downtime per year) vs 99.9% (8.76 hours per year) is a serious factor for businesses to consider.
 
Its not as seriouse as you are trying to make it out to be. The average work pc has more downtime then that but no one ever notices because it doesnt happen all at once.

Also the OC gets mentioned because very few people get the same oc as each other, its the same as "your oc may be higher or lower then this" as a completely valid statement.
 
99.999% uptime means the system is down roughly 8 hours a year. I would consider that perfectly acceptable, considering that could be at any time of the day. What are you doing where 8 hours of downtime a year is unacceptable for an Office solution?
 
A single work pc going down is not a major issue, but if the exchange server goes down it's noticeable.
 
Rizen said:
99.999% uptime means the system is down roughly 8 hours a year. I would consider that perfectly acceptable, considering that could be at any time of the day. What are you doing where 8 hours of downtime a year is unacceptable for an Office solution?
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Let's just hope those 8 hours aren't before a big presentation at work, Final exams for students or final papers (worth 50% of your grade).

"But but but, the cloud ate my work!"
 
Parmenides said:
Let's just hope those 8 hours aren't before a big presentation at work, Final exams for students or final papers (worth 50% of your grade).

"But but but, the cloud ate my work!"
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I work at a major tech corporation, there are outages related to various IT systems all the time. It's just part of the nature of business. Obviously you try and minimize them, but there are practically zero systems that are 100% uptime, even locally hosted on-premise solutions.
 
It might be up, but it's still going to be dog slow if all you have is a ADSL connection. nothing beats locally hosted stuff that is gigabit speed and still works if the internet is down.

Especially with the NSA stuff I can't believe people are even trusting these cloud solutions.
 
Rizen said:
99.999% uptime means the system is down roughly 8 hours a year. I would consider that perfectly acceptable, considering that could be at any time of the day. What are you doing where 8 hours of downtime a year is unacceptable for an Office solution?
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You are adding a few extra 9s there. People here are saying 99.999% is what people consider acceptible 99.9% is not. That said 99.9% is about 8 hours 45 minutes. 99.999% is about 6 minutes. So there is a big difference between the two.

depending on the timing of that, I could see about 9 hours of downtime a year for a mail server getting to be a tad much.
 
Exavior said:
You are adding a few extra 9s there. People here are saying 99.999% is what people consider acceptible 99.9% is not. That said 99.9% is about 8 hours 45 minutes. 99.999% is about 6 minutes. So there is a big difference between the two.

depending on the timing of that, I could see about 9 hours of downtime a year for a mail server getting to be a tad much.
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Sorry, I fucked up my math.
 
Parmenides said:
Let's just hope those 8 hours aren't before a big presentation at work, Final exams for students or final papers (worth 50% of your grade).

"But but but, the cloud ate my work!"
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if you have something THAT big then you should cache it locally and run 365 in offline.
 
Rizen said:
I work at a major tech corporation, there are outages related to various IT systems all the time. It's just part of the nature of business. Obviously you try and minimize them, but there are practically zero systems that are 100% uptime, even locally hosted on-premise solutions.
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I know. And 99.99% is a very nice number, but it's never 99.99%. Google and Amazon are quite worse than that. I'm not sure who's really hitting 99.9% either. Throw in the office network issues and you have a much smaller number to work with.

At least you can save locally thankfully. The cloud is the borg though
 
According to the headline they are saying that it "exceeds" 99.9% up-time. Which could mean 99.99%, 99.999% etc. I didn't read the article so I'm basing this strictly off the title but still, at worse case you're looking at 8 hours and at best case 6 minutes per year....

Anyway you slice it I'd say that's pretty damn good. I would gander that most places that run on premises Exchange or any other mail solution probably have a much lower up-time percentage.

I don't understand why a couple people keep bringing up workstation down-time. That is not the same ballgame as a core service being unavailable.
 
TheBlueChanell said:
According to the headline they are saying that it "exceeds" 99.9% up-time. Which could mean 99.99%, 99.999% etc. I didn't read the article so I'm basing this strictly off the title but still, at worse case you're looking at 8 hours and at best case 6 minutes per year....

Anyway you slice it I'd say that's pretty damn good. I would gander that most places that run on premises Exchange or any other mail solution probably have a much lower up-time percentage.

I don't understand why a couple people keep bringing up workstation down-time. That is not the same ballgame as a core service being unavailable.
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I will admit I had done the same thing and didnt' read the article.

Reading the article.
Between July 2012 and June 2013, the overall quarterly uptime for the cloud-hosted email and collaboration suite hit 99.98 percent, 99.97 percent, 99.94 percent and 99.97 percent
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So about 1 hour 45 minutes to 5 hour 15 minute.
 
The concern I have is that its browser based correct? About 10% of helpdesk call volume is related to browser based troubleshooting (trusted sites, compatibility mode, corrupt cache, corrupt dll files, toolbars, spyware etc)

Is that included in their up time? The local up time is a major factor. How often does the browser crash and do users lose work vs office crashing when locally installed which is still an issue.
 
jroe52 said:
The concern I have is that its browser based correct? About 10% of helpdesk call volume is related to browser based troubleshooting (trusted sites, compatibility mode, corrupt cache, corrupt dll files, toolbars, spyware etc)

Is that included in their up time? The local up time is a major factor. How often does the browser crash and do users lose work vs office crashing when locally installed which is still an issue.
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No, or at least it doesn't need to be. You get a full copy of Office Pro (whatever the current version is) to install on your computer, so it is a locally installed version. Now you can opt to use the web version through sharepoint if you want, just like you have with office when you buy volume licenses. but you do get full copies of the software. So Office on your comptuer works just fine no matter what is going on with the server. Which is one thing a lot of people here seem to miss when complaining about you losing your presentation or whatever. Unless you stored it on the server which is something else. What you have out on the server they are hosting (and is what the uptime is for) is for a sharepoint server, Exchange server and lynx server. So that is what the uptime is for. Those 3 services. You can still use office as long as your local machine isn't dead even if not connected to the internet.
 
Rizen said:
I work at a major tech corporation, there are outages related to various IT systems all the time. It's just part of the nature of business. Obviously you try and minimize them, but there are practically zero systems that are 100% uptime, even locally hosted on-premise solutions.
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When we have downtime, I like to say "I'm working on it" and not "We're waiting for someone to fix it, but we have no direct contact with those people and have no ETA".

I can accept 8 hours a year of downtime, as I'm sure we have that already (shitty internet connection in a very rural area). But, I don't like the "sit back and wait for them to fix it" part. But, it's still not that bad.
 
Exavior said:
What you have out on the server they are hosting (and is what the uptime is for) is for a sharepoint server, Exchange server and lynx server. So that is what the uptime is for. Those 3 services. You can still use office as long as your local machine isn't dead even if not connected to the internet.
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Have you seen how people react when email doesn't work, or takes longer than 30 seconds to receive an email that was just sent? End users have some high expectations. :)

Lync, BTW, not Lynx.

And Office 365 standard apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) do work fine without a network connection.
 
Trimlock said:
I swear, do people post silly stuff like this to just hate? You ever heard of YMMV? You ever OC something?

An above 99% uptime is impressive, especially with a still fairly new product. Everytime ive had to use it for school it has always been working and have had no complaints so far.
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It's replacing local software with 100% uptime, and a better ROI after factoring yearly fees.
 
Ur_Mom said:
When we have downtime, I like to say "I'm working on it" and not "We're waiting for someone to fix it, but we have no direct contact with those people and have no ETA".
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If the issue gets resolved within the same timeframe, what you're able to say is totally irrelevant.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but if the network is down you can still get work done. If office is down not so much. That being said 8 hrs down time/yrly is acceptable because if its after hours or on weekends even less people will be affected. And that 8 hrs could be spread out to 2-3 smaller outages. Now if exchange is down, omg you'd think the world is coming to an end...wow.
 
wonderfield said:
If the issue gets resolved within the same timeframe, what you're able to say is totally irrelevant.
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Depends on the company. If a critical system is down that causes employee downtime (Exchange), they need it fixed now and with details to the higher ups. We have a parent company that loves details. We can't just say "Well, the cloud had some rain...." or something. They want more than that. Smaller companies, I don't see any problems. Shit happens. Email server is down. Fine. That's all that's needed. It's fixed soon, and the problem is gone. No follow up, nothing.

We are evaluating hosted Exchange and Office 365 right now (past 6 months or so), and I've found downtime of our network connection to be the major cause of any outages. I have not noticed a single minute of downtime with the hosted services.
 
pcjunkie said:
Correct me if I'm wrong but if the network is down you can still get work done. If office is down not so much. That being said 8 hrs down time/yrly is acceptable because if its after hours or on weekends even less people will be affected. And that 8 hrs could be spread out to 2-3 smaller outages. Now if exchange is down, omg you'd think the world is coming to an end...wow.
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Apart from exchange being down you can still get work done you just wont be able to save or pull files from the cloud.
 
Trimlock said:
Apart from exchange being down you can still get work done you just wont be able to save or pull files from the cloud.
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Ahh..OK, so basically 365 is standalone with saves to the cloud then? Then its the same difference with the network being down and not being able to access/save to the network drives.
 
pcjunkie said:
Ahh..OK, so basically 365 is standalone with saves to the cloud then? Then its the same difference with the network being down and not being able to access/save to the network drives.
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I should said that you lose any cloud based options, which I dont know what those are haha, I havent had a moment when 365 was down since using it to tell you what they all are. But you can still work.
 
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