Public Clouds Can Deliver 99.999% Availability SLAs

You heard it here first. Yes, you can achieve five nines of availability in public cloud.

I was reviewing the Yankee Group’s controversial report, “Cloud 99.99: The Small Print Exposed” about Cloud vendors offering “enterprises poor service guarantees and limited financial redress if their service fails.” Thomas Wailgum details some of the study here if you’re not a Yankee client.

My response to this is, “Come on guys. You obviously haven’t run a hosted business!” It comes down to the economics. I will argue that you CAN get 99.999, that’s five nines, of availability in the public Cloud, if you are willing to pay for it! And it will still be an order of magnitude cheaper than doing it yourself with your own redundant data centers, server hardware, software, and staff. In my next post, I’m going to detail out the cost of data center vs. the Amazon Cloud with a 5 Nine SLA. Don’t believe me, just wait.

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Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.

Jim Kaskade