Today people got addicted to cloud services including cloud licensing models. Most software vendors offer their software in a Software As a Service (SAS) model which means that the software that is running locally has to “phone home” (i.e. connect to the vendor’s servers) in order to work. This “E.T. Phone Home” model is great as long as everything works.

Every SAS software has its own Service Level Agreement (SLA) that discusses availability, uptime etc. A common SLA offers an uptime of 99.99%. This means that the software is available 99.9% of the time. Now, let’s make the scenario more realistic. Let’s say your organization is using ten different software packages each of them has the same guaranteed uptime SLA of 99.9%. If we calculate the total uptime for all the components we will see that the total uptime goes down to 99%. This means that your organization (e.g. call center) might experience a downtime 1% of the time for at least one of the software components. In other words during ten work hours per day you might experience a six minutes downtime. Surely six minutes daily downtime or 42 minutes weekly downtime is not good for business and organization cannot and should not accept it.

What can be done? Choose vendors that offer you a software that continues to work for a reasonable period of time even if it cannot phone home. In addition, we recommend to deploy a backup route for critical software components that will be automatically used whenever the primary route stops working.

For additional reading take a look at the following post discussing ten ways for a reliable call center technology.