Redmond is fast staking its claim as the undisputed cloud leader. CEO Steve Ballmer has pushed the company towards a devices and services concept, and cloud technology is at the very center of this transformation.
And without doubt the most important element of cloud powered services is the reliability and dependability of the infrastructure.
Ballmer has often reiterated that cloud is the future, and Microsoft is now highlighting the reliability of its Office 365 productivity suite and the uptime of the service recorded in the past four quarters — from July 2012 to June 2013.
Microsoft says that the overall uptime was 99.965 percent on average. And this figure is even more impressive when you consider that more and more users are making the switch to the platform:
“The uptime number includes Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office Web Apps, weighted on the number of people using each of these services. Customers use these services together, so all of these are taken into account while calculating uptime.
We measure availability as the number of minutes that the Office 365 service is available in a calendar month as a percentage of the total number of minutes in that month. We call this measure of availability the uptime number. Within this calculation we include our business, government and education services.”
The blog post also talks about how its servers are distributed so possible failures in one area do not affect the rest. Plenty of technical details are offered that make for an interesting read.
While Office 365 has had its share of downtimes, small they may be, Microsoft has said that it is rolling out a new program that will offer uptime numbers on the service to the public on an ongoing basis.
The company continues to sign new deals with companies around the globe, and once again points out that Office 365 is the outright best solution for those that want increased productivity on the go.
