Cloud network architecture – Profitability through Monotonous Reliability

 The Break/fix model is no longer acceptable.  Waiting until a system fails before fixing is like waiting for your truck to begin smoking before replacing your oil.  In the old days systems administration was guesswork.  Even among IT professionals most technicians didn’t really know why the system failed.  Rebooting the server after a failure seemed to work just fine… until the next time.  Too many reboots to keep the server running meant replacing the hardware.  Many old school system administrators treated computers more like magic than science. 

Today we know how to identify problems before the system fails.  Modern network architecture is built on the SLA.  A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the promise and in the cloud a contractual agrement from an IT provider to match certain business requirements.  The SLA for availability (the server being up and running) is measure in 9’s.  The more 9’s promised the more available the network.  99.9% availability equates to three 9s or 8.76 hours per year of un-planned downtime.  99.99 is four 9’s or 52.56 minutes per year of unplanned downtime.

This is exciting because a typical break/fix network runs between 85% and 90% availability.  This adds about 14.9% more productivity to the network.  Company productivity of course equates to profitability.  When the network is down, the average small business loses $7,314 / hour in lost productivity to the business.  (This doesn’t count fixing the problem.)  At 90% this equates to 36.5 hours of downtime per year.  At $7,314 / hour this works out to, $266,961.00 / year in lost productivity.  This is a conservative estimate.  Many large businesses use the figure $50,000 / hour in lost productivity.  ($1.8 million dollars in lost productivity) Many fortune 500 companies use $1 million / hour ($36.5 million dollars in lost productivity / year)

 The cloud pays for itself in monotonous reliability.  Server downtime has minimal if any impact on the business.  From the IT perspective profitability is maximized as systems reach 100% availability.  The business owner and management teams statistically spend 20% or 8 hours a week (or 416 hours / year) putting out IT Fires.  Now the manager can spend that time managing for profit rather than minimizing the effect of IT system downtime.