Part three of our “why, vendor, why?” blog series considers the damaging impact of downtime. You decided to utilize Cloud to improve your overall business efficiency, but if your online staffing and recruitment software is experiencing noticeable downtime, you’re not reaping all of the benefits that your solution has to offer.
When it comes to downtime, every fraction of time lost counts against your company’s revenue. Let’s delve deeper with some simple math: if a company were to experience absolutely no downtime over the course of a standard year, they would have an uptime of 24 hours X 365 days = 8760 hours. A vendor that promises 99% uptime has a downtime of—prepare yourself—88 hours per year (8760 X 0.99 = 8672 hours of uptime). By contrast, a vendor with a history of 99.999% uptime has a yearly downtime of 0.1 hours (8670 X 0.99999, subtracted from 8760), a grand total of 6 minutes. As you can see, the difference is tremendous. Unfortunately, many potential Cloud customers aren’t crunching numbers in their heads on-the-spot, and the difference between 99% and 99.999% seems insignificant or imperceptible.
Cloud-based software solutions are delivered via the Internet, meaning that if your company is experiencing downtime, you’ll temporarily lose access to various core business functions. Every minute of downtime means a loss of revenue. This is especially true for staffers and recruiters, whose success depends largely upon reliable access to business data around the clock for swift placements and hasty responses to job orders. Moreover, costly downtime generally can’t be planned for, so the more unreliable your vendor’s uptime, the greater your risk of loss.
If you’re in the process of comparing staffing and recruiting software vendors, ask for records of uptime history before making a decision. Looking at the history of downtime over a period of years, you’ll be able to gauge how much downtime you should expect with this provider. If a potential vendor chooses not to divulge this, it may be a red flag. Make sure that the vendor you choose has an excellent and provable record of uptime. Since its inception in 2005, AkkenCloud has not experienced any downtime so far. We continue to invest and work diligently to keep this uptime. High functionality of your business is crucial for success, so you can’t afford to lose a single minute more than you have to.
